professional voice volume 4 issue 1

PROFESSIONAL

V O I C EpV

*

TEACHER QUALITY & QUALITY TEACHING

Volume 4Issue 1

RRP $10

Spring 2005

EditorDiana Ward

Editorial CommittEE

Ross Dean, John Graham, Ann Taylor and Diana Ward

dEsignErs

Kim Fleming and Diana Ward

PublishEd by

The Australian Education Union Victorian Branch

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Erwin’s Printing

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annual subsCriPtions$25 within Australia (free to financial AEU members). Please contact the AEU Publications Unit on 03 9417 2822 for further information. A subscription form is available in the back of this issue or downloadable from www.aeuvic.asn.au/publications.

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$10 within AustraliaAdvertising is accepted according to AEU guidelines. Please contact Lyn Baird for further details. Phone: 03 9418 4879. Email: [email protected]. A rate card is available for download at www.aeuvic.asn.au/publications.Editorial correspondence should be directed to Diana Ward, Professional Voice, Australian Education Union Vic Branch, 112 Trenerry Crescent Abbotsford VIC 3067. Phone: 03 9418 4811. Email: [email protected] is held by respective authors. The opinions of the authors are their own and are not necessarily the policy of the Australian Education Union Victorian Branch. For authorisation to reproduce any article in part or whole, please contact the editor.The AEU Victorian Branch can be contacted at:112 Trenerry Crescent, PO Box 363, Abbotsford 3067Tel: 03 9417 2822 Fax: 1300 568 078Web: www.aeuvic.asn.auISSN:1445-4165

tEaChEr quality & quality tEaChing

c o n t e n t s

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7 EditorialPat Byrne

11 teaching in the knowledge societyAndy HargreavesProfessor Hargreaves looks at the knowledge society and a school's role within this, considering issues such as globalisation, economics and policy-building in creating successful communities.

27 quality teaching For quality learning: CCts and transformative classroomsLeonie Rowan and Chris BigumRowan and Bigum ask how quality teaching can be measured. They profile Deakin University's Quality Learning Research Priority Area and some of the research chal-lenges in determining educational quality.

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33 quality Educators Produce quality outcomesDarcel MoyleMoyle highlights key findings from recent government reports on outcomes for Indigenous education. She posits that what must be essential in the debate is an understanding of Indigenous communities.

39 Wangaratta to Paris: Early childhood education perspectivesGlenys JacksonJackson compares the French école maternelle system in Paris to Victoria's pre-school system, and finds the European way offers many ideas that could boost Victoria's preschool provision.

45 aristotle, Phonesis & technical EducationNeil HooleyHooley looks at the Coalition Government's policy plans for technical education and applies Aristotle's thoughts on poiesis/techne as distinct from phronesis/praxis to student learning.

53 Public Education: a class actLyndsay ConnorsConnors considers various connotations of class as it applies to public education. She takes into account historical and contemporary definitions of class and highlights the dangers of public education policy in the current context.

59 review - thinking about teaching as a ProfessionJohn Graham considers the findings and analysis of the longitudinal study by Don Anderson, titled The Profession of Teaching, which compares the views of teachers to those of lawyers, doctors and engineers

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dEbatEs about tEaChEr quality and quality teaching are not new: We have been having them for decades. The focus has changed over time: We have considered school structures, school planning, school leadership, change management, school effectiveness, to name but a few.

The current round is characterised by a focus on teacher quality, underpinned by research which quantifies how much of a student’s performance can be attributed to the quality of his/her teacher.

Research by John Hattie, for instance, which synthesised an extensive amount of relevant evidence-based research, has identified and estimated the major sources of explained variance in students’ achievement outcomes. Basically it shows that:

• 50 per cent of the variance is due to the student himself/herself• 30 per cent is due to the teacher• Between 5 per cent and 10 per cent is due to home and peer factors• Between 5 per cent and 10 per cent is due to school and principal factors.Hattie acknowledged that: “It is what students bring to the table that predicts

achievement more than any other variable. The correlation between ability and achieve-ment is high.”

He goes on to say, in relation to teachers, that “it is what teachers know, do and care

Pat byrnE

editorial

teacher quality &quality teaching

ProFEssional VoiCE - Volume 4 Issue 18

about which is very powerful in this learning equation” and, further, that systems “should focus on the greatest source of variance that can make the difference—the teacher.”

Given that, for many teachers, wanting to make a difference is precisely why we became, and remain, teachers, a view such as that expressed by Hattie should be welcome news. In the right context, it is.

In the right context, it means recruiting the best possible students into teacher edu-cation; ensuring that the education faculties within universities are no longer regarded as the ‘poor cousins’; it means high quality professional learning for teachers through-out their careers—professional learning which employs what we know to be ‘best practice’ rather than what we have become accustomed to over our teaching lives.

It also means properly resourcing schools so that the quality of what occurs in the classroom is not damaged by large classes, prescriptive and excessive bureaucratic requirements, insufficient trained personnel to deal with students at risk, or a lack of access to excellent and up to date facilities.

Teachers know full well the importance of teacher quality and quality teaching; they know the benefits to be had from both. They also recognise quality professional learning despite decades of information sessions masquerading as professional devel-opment, in which the principal aim is to acquaint teachers with the latest regulation or policy changes rather than to consider improved classroom practice.

Contrary to some impressions portrayed by politicians and the media, teachers are not afraid of reflecting on the quality of the work they do. They welcome quality profes-sional development which increases their instructional repertoire and enables them to make sense of the curriculum changes around them; they recognise that effective teaching requires creativity.

What angers them in this debate is the almost exclusive focus on the teacher to the exclusion of all else; consideration of student factors is ignored. Downplaying the effects of factors such as socio-economic status, not only misrepresents the vast body of research which exists on this question, but places the onus of responsibility for student outcomes onto teachers who are often working in very difficult environments. Given the statistical evidence showing the correlation between student factors and achievement, it is saying in effect that those teachers working in low socio-economic areas are not as good as those teachers working in more affluent areas, something we know to be absurd!

The Federal education minister Brendan Nelson is one who has chosen to misrep-resent the research by completely ignoring the student factors and focussing solely on the teacher quality aspect, managing to imply that poor student outcomes are the result of incompetent teachers, a jump that the media is all too happy to make.

Indeed, at the Making Schools Better Conference in Melbourne last year, Nelson remarked that we should forget about funding as an issue, because “the most danger-ous thing facing students today is incompetent teachers”.

Ken Rowe from ACER, at the same conference, asked:

What matters most? Certainly NOT the ‘pimple’ of student ‘compositional characteristics’ such as gender, socio-economic differences, nor school-


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structural arrangements of interest to ‘school effectiveness’ researchers, but the ‘pumpkin’ of quality teaching and learning provision, supported by stra-tegic teaching standards and on-going teacher professional development.

To frame the debate as an either/or argument, as is currently being done, is completely unhelpful. It misrepresents the genuine efforts being made in Australia and elsewhere to review and improve pedagogical practice in a thoughtful way.

From a broader political perspective, this concentration on teacher quality enables conservative politicians from all persuasions to retreat from the big budget implica-tions of adequately resourcing schools. If the responsibility can be seen to rest with the teacher—irrespective of student factors—then the argument for needs-based funding is considerably weakened.

This is a powerful motivation for a political party under attack for its funding policies which are patently not needs-based and which favour the wealthy, under the mantra of ‘choice’.

Clearly, as educators committed to equity, we have a responsibility to resist this agenda. However, we must not be defensive in that resistance—there is much excel-lent and ongoing research about teacher quality, which should be embraced by the profession, by way of best practice professional learning. This does not have to be at the expense of a consideration of student factors—the two go hand-in-hand. It is not an either/or argument and should never be put in that context.

All contributors in this issue of Professional Voice are involved in fuelling debate about teacher quality and quality teaching across various fronts. Some are education academics, others policy researchers and others practising teachers, yet all offer some common ground in considering what teacher quality and quality teaching is.

In looking at the variety of policy positions, Professor Andy Hargreaves looks at the knowledge society and a school's role within this. He considers issues such as globalisation, economics and policy-building in creating successful communities.

Leonie Rowan and Chris Bigum consider how we specifically measure quality in an education context. As part of a core research group at Deakin University, they highlight some of the research challenges in determining educational quality.

Darcel Moyle on the other hand, looks at the state of Indigenous education provi-sion and outcomes. She finds that policy needs to be less rigid in its measurements and more inclusive, with an emphasis on on-the-ground debate.

In a preschool context, Glenys Jackson compares the French école maternelle system in Paris to Victoria's preschool provision, highlighting the vast differences in the approaches of each place towards preschool provision.

Neil Hooley looks at the Coalition Government's policy plans for technical educa-tion and applies Aristotle's thoughts on poiesis/techne as distinct from phronesis/praxis to student learning. He suggests lessons to be learnt from the past in producing quality technical teaching outcomes.

The public debate about teacher quality and quality teaching has often been framed in simplistic terms. It assumes that there is presently a problem with teacher quality which can be solved by simply tightening performance requirements.

Pat byrnEteacher quality & quality teaching


The authors of these papers paint a far more complex picture of what quality in our

profession means and what strategies and policies can be used to achieve it. There are lessons to be learnt from the past, from overseas and from our practising teachers. Most of all, the debates should never cease. It's time to start talking and thinking out loud.

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WE liVE in a knowledge economy, a knowledge society. Knowledge economies are stimulated and driven by creativity and ingenuity. Knowledge society schools have to create these qualities otherwise their people and their nations will be left behind. Like other kinds of capitalism, the knowledge economy is, in Joseph Schumpeter’s terms, a force of creative destruction. It stimulates growth and prosperity, but its relentless pursuit of profit and self-interest also strains and fragments the social order. Along with other public institutions, our schools must therefore also foster the compassion, community and cosmopolitan identity that will offset the knowledge economy’s most destructive effects. The knowledge economy primarily serves the private good. The knowledge soci-ety also encompasses the public good. Our schools have to prepare young people for both of them.

Schools today serve and shape a world in which there can be great economic oppor-tunity and improvement if people can learn to work more flexibly, invest in their future financial security, reskill or relocate themselves as the economy shifts around them, and value working creatively and collaboratively. The world that schools serve is also characterized by growing social instability. The bonds between citizens are increasingly strained by the fragmenting effects of economic flexibility. People who spend most of

teaching in the knoWlEdgE soCiEty

andy hargrEaVEs


their time producing and consuming find less and less time for family or community. There is a loss of trust in and growing suspicion about political and professional integ-rity. The widening gaps between rich and poor fan the flames of terrorism, crime and mounting insecurity.

Yet, instead of fostering creativity and ingenuity, more and more school systems have become obsessed with imposing and micromanaging curriculum uniformity. In place of ambitious missions of compassion and community, schools and teachers have been squeezed into the tunnel vision of test scores, achievement targets and league tables of accountability. And rather than cultivating cosmopolitan identity and the basic emotion of sympathy, which Adam Smith (1809) called the emotional foundation of democracy, too many educational systems promote exaggerated and self-absorbed senses of national identity.

In many parts of the world, the rightful quest for higher educational standards has degenerated into a compulsive obsession with standardization. By and large, our schools are preparing young people neither to work well in the knowledge economy nor to live well in a strong civil society. Instead of promoting economic invention and social integration, too many schools are becoming mired in the regulations and routines of soulless standardization.

We are living in a defining moment of educational history when the world in which teachers do their work is changing profoundly, and the demographic composition of teaching is turning over dramatically. The vast cohort of teachers who entered the pro-fession in the expansionist decades of the 1960s and 1970s are retiring. Teaching is becoming a young person’s profession again. Whoever enters teaching and however they approach their work will shape the profession and what it is able to achieve with our children for the next thirty years.

If we capitulate to the idea that state education can only be a low cost system run-ning on low skilled, poorly paid and overloaded teachers whose job is to maintain order, teach to the test and follow standardized curriculum scripts, then teachers for the next three decades will be neither capable of nor committed to teaching for and beyond the knowledge society. They will instead become the drones and clones of policy makers’ anaemic ambitions for what underfunded systems can achieve.

Alternatively, we can promote a high investment, high capacity educational system in which highly skilled teachers are able to generate creativity and ingenuity among their pupils by experiencing creativity and flexibility themselves in how they are treated and developed as knowledge society professionals. In this second scenario, teaching and teachers will reach far beyond the technical tasks of producing acceptable test results, to pursuing teaching as a life-shaping, world-changing social mission again.

In their preparation, their professional development, and their working lives, today’s teachers must get a grasp of and a grip on the knowledge society in which their pupils live and will work. If teachers do not understand the knowledge society, they cannot prepare their pupils for it. As a traditional Irish saying proclaims: “You have to listen to the river if you want to catch a trout.”

Teachers must take their place again among society’s most respected intellectu-als—moving beyond the citadel of the classroom to being, and preparing their pupils to


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andy hargrEaVEsteaching in the knowledge society

be, citizens of the world. They must do their best to ensure that their pupils promote and prosper from the private goods of the knowledge economy. They must also help their pupils commit to the vital public goods that cannot be taken care of by the corporate interests of the knowledge economy—a strong and vigorous civil society, developing the character that promotes involvement in the community, and cultivating the dispositions of sympathy and care for people in other nations and cultures that are at the heart of cosmo-politan identity. These are the challenges facing teachers in the knowledge society today. They are also the focus of my new book on Teaching in the Knowledge Society which deals with our changing world and its implications for the changing work of teaching.

-ii-The term ‘knowledge society’ is actually a misnomer. I use it because of its widespread and accepted currency. In truth, though, a knowledge society is really a learning society. Knowledge societies process information and knowledge in ways that maximize learn-ing, stimulate ingenuity and invention and develop the capacity to initiate and cope with change. In the knowledge economy, wealth and prosperity depend on people’s capacity to out-invent and outwit their competitors, to tune in to the desires and demands of the consumer market, and to change jobs or develop new skills as economic fluctuations and downturns require. In the knowledge economy, these capacities are not just the prop-erty of individuals, but of organizations. According to Robert Reich (2001), President Clinton’s former Secretary of Labour, knowledge society organizations build their capacity to share, create and apply new knowledge continuously over time. They create “mutual learning that leads to continuous innovation (which) tends to be informal, unplanned, serendipitous” (Reich, 2001). They depend on collective as well as individual intelli-gence (Brown & Lauder, 2001). Knowledge society organizations develop these capaci-ties by providing their members with extensive opportunities for upskilling and retraining; by breaking down barriers to learning and communication and getting people to work in overlapping, flexible teams; by looking at problems and mistakes as opportunities for learning more than occasions for blame; by involving everyone in the ‘big picture’ of where the organization is going; and by developing the ‘social capital’ of networks and relationships that provide people with extra support and further learning.

For futurist and management guru, Peter Drucker, the basic economic resource of society is no longer capital or labour. Instead:

It is and will be knowledge.... Value is now created by ‘productivity’ and ‘innovation’, both applications of knowledge to work. The leading groups of the knowledge society will be ‘knowledge workers’.... The economic chal-lenge... will therefore be the productivity of knowledge work and the knowl-edge worker. (Drucker, 1993:8)

The key to a strong knowledge economy is not only whether people can access information. It is also how well they can process information. The OECD has been one of the prime movers behind new knowledge economy initiatives. In a significant position paper for OECD, Carnoy and Castells describe how the information is centrally concerned with knowledge and learning:


The distinguishing feature of work in the information age is the centrality of knowledge, especially “transportable” general knowledge that is not specific to a single job or firm. The best jobs are those that require high levels of education (high levels of general knowledge) and provide opportunities to accumulate more knowledge. The best firms are those that create the best environment for teaching, learning, and interchanging information. It is knowledge and information that creates flexibility in work—the capacity of firms to improve product lines, production processes, and marketing strate-gies, all with the same work force; and the capacity of workers to learn new processes as they change; to shift jobs several times in the course of a work life; to move geographically, and, if necessary, to learn entirely new voca-tions. (Carnoy & Castells, 1999:33)

The knowledge society is a learning society. Economic success and a culture of con-tinuous innovation depend on the capacity of workers to keep learning themselves and from each other. A knowledge economy runs on the power to think, learn and innovate. The OECD’s influential report on Knowledge Management in the Learning Society links knowledge management to the challenges created by the acceleration of change. “We are moving into a ‘learning economy’ where the success of individuals, firms, regions and countries will reflect, more than anything else, their ability to learn” (OECD, 2000:29). These trends, OECD point out elsewhere, raise “profound questions for the kinds of knowledge pupils are being equipped with and ought to be equipped with, by schools” (OECD, 2001:29).

Teaching for the knowledge society involves cultivating special capacities, not just any kind of learning in young people. These include developing deep cognitive learning, creativity and ingenuity among pupils; drawing on research, working in networks and teams and pursuing continuous professional learning as teachers; and promoting prob-lem-solving, risk-taking, trust in fellow professionals (whether they are close to you, or always agree with you or not), ability to cope with change and commitment to continu-ous improvement as organizations.

-iii-The knowledge economy also exerts costs—on a public good it has little capacity to care for. The knowledge economy drives people to put their self-interest before the social good, to indulge in consumption instead of involving themselves in community, to enjoy the buzz and pizzazz of temporary teamwork more than developing the long-term emotions of loyalty and perseverance that sustain the enduring commitments of grouplife.

The knowledge economy is necessarily hungry for profit. Left to itself, it drains resources from the state, eroding the institutions of public life, including state schools themselves. In its most extreme forms of what I call market fundamentalism, the knowledge economy drives wedges between rich and poor, within nations and between them, creating anger and despair among the excluded. Exclusion exacerbates crime as people steal what they cannot earn. It creates societies of suspicious minds—walled within their gated communities, watched by endless security cameras and protected in private schools that keep out the excluded (Reich, 2001; Handy, 2001). The knowledge


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economy also sows the seeds of ethnic and religious fundamentalism as some people turn aside from the market to find other sources of hope, meaning and certainty in their lives (Barber, 1995; Castells, 1998). In rebuffing the market, they also reject democratic reason and cosmopolitan tolerance—persecuting outsiders and repressing their own women in their opposition to Western values (Giddens, 2000). Insecurity, crime and ter-rorism are the predictable (though never just) desserts of knowledge societies that have little desire to redistribute resources to improve the quality of life domestically, and that neglect their humanitarian and democratic responsibilities internationally (Vail, 1999; Bauman, 1998). One-sided globalisation produces lop-sided societies. Alain Michel, the Inspector General of France’s educational system puts it this way:

Globalization, because of the risks it brings of soulless standardization, can lead to fragmentation and a reduced sense of belonging to a wider com-munity. The excesses of unbridled markets, in which prices and the market are more important than social or cultural relationships, are being met with a reaction of narrow nationalism, regionalism and parochialism. (Michel, A., 2001:219)

International financier and philanthropist George Soros expresses similar sentiments:

Globalization also has a negative side.... Many people, particularly in less developed countries have been hurt by globalization without being sup-ported by a social safety net; many others have been marginalized by global markets .... Globalization has (also) caused a misallocation of resources between private goods and public goods. Markets are good at creating wealth but are not designed to take care of other needs. The heedless pur-suit of profit can hurt the environment and conflict with other social values. (Soros, G., 2002)

The challenge, says Soros, is not to attack globalization or destroy the knowledge economy. Its economic benefits are too great for that. Instead, we have to commit more resources and pay better global attention to the other social needs. In preparing the generations of the future, state education is in pole position to teach a set of values, dispositions and senses of global responsibility that extend beyond the bounds of the knowledge economy; that shows people not only how to make a living, but also how to live a life (Reich, 2001).

Teaching beyond the knowledge economy entails developing the values and emo-tions of young people’s character; emphasizing emotional as well as cognitive learning; building commitments to group life and not just short-term teamwork; and cultivating a cosmopolitan identity which shows genuine curiosity towards and willingness to learn from other cultures, and develops responsibility towards excluded groups within and beyond one’s own society. Among teachers, this means committing to personal devel-opment as well as formal professional learning, working with colleagues in long-term groups as well as short-term teams, and having opportunities to teach (and therefore learn) in other contexts and countries. For the organization, the challenge is to balance the chaotic forces of risk and change with a work culture that has elements of continu-ity, a foundation of trust and a capacity to create coherence among the many initiatives


the school is pursuing. Most of all, in an educational world dominated by standards, test scores and achievement targets, teaching beyond the knowledge economy means retrieving and rehabilitating the idea of teaching being a sacred vocation that pursues a compelling social mission. The cliché of “making a difference” isn’t enough anymore as a moral purpose for teaching. What difference, in what kind of world and for what reasons?—these are the issues that count in today’s high-stakes, high risk knowledge society.

Community, not curriculum is where many of our improvement efforts now need to be focussed. One of the most common causes of secondary school dropout is pupils’ feelings that there is not one adult who really knows or cares for them (Hargreaves, Earl, & Ryan, 1996). England is trying to solve a massive block in performance as children move from primary school to secondary school, by making improvements to the cur-riculum (DfES, 2001). But the curriculum is not the main problem. Kathryn Riley and her colleagues’ research shows that pupils who do badly in the early years of secondary school experience incredible fragmentation in their lives—between different parents and families, and constantly changing homes (Riley & Rustique-Forrester, in press). They are denied what is called social capital (Fukuyama, 2000; Coleman, 1988). The school then compounds this fragmentation by subjecting pupils to a multitude of subject teach-ers, by repeatedly excluding them from class or school because of behaviour problems, and by exposing them to an endless parade of substitute teachers and “casualized” teachers who make up the staff of many urban schools. Tragically, it is the pupils with the most fragmented lives who get the most fragmented experience of secondary schooling and who are prevented from developing social capital.

The educational answer to the angst of early adolescence is mainly to be found not in more curriculum, but in stronger community. Especially at this point in young people’s education, improving achievement, especially among those most at risk, is not secured by concentrating on achievement alone. At a time when adolescents are assailed by so many other influences in their life, focussing their minds exclusively on achievement is futile. Achieving at learning also demands intellectual and emotional engagement with schooling and all the relationships it contains. Our secondary schools are undermining our capacity to hold the knowledge society together—and the excessive and exclusive emphasis on achievement alone is largely responsible.

Teaching in the knowledge society requires levels of skills and judgement far beyond those involved in merely delivering someone else’s prescribed curriculum and standard-ized test scores. It requires qualities of personal and intellectual maturity that take years to develop. Teaching in the knowledge society cannot be a refuge for second-choice careers, a low level system of technical delivery, or as some policymakers are saying, an exhausting job that should be handled mainly by the young and energetic before they move on to something else. Teaching in the knowledge society, rather, should be a career of first choice, a job for grown-up intellectuals, a long term commitment, a social mission, a job for life. Anything less leaves our sights far below the knowledge society horizon—and teaching should never be about settling for less.


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-iV-The evidence that my colleagues and I have collected in New York State and Ontario, Canada, affirms what has already been widely established in England (Whitty Power & Halpin, 1998; Pollard, et al, 1994; Gerwitz, et al, 1995; Helsby, 1999; Webb & Vulliamy, 1999; Jeffrey & Woods, 1996; Menter, et al, 1997); Australia (Dinham & Scott, 1997); New Zealand (Wylie, 1994); Texas (McNeil, 2000) and Alberta (Harrison & Kachur, 1999) in showing that many large-scale reform efforts in the last 15 years have neither prepared people for the knowledge economy nor for public life beyond it. Survey and interview data from a dozen secondary schools in Ontario and New York State to show that curriculum standards have largely degenerated into soulless stand-ardization. The standards are irrelevant to the highest achieving schools who feel they are already meeting them. In the schools with high numbers of special education or vocational pupils or those who are learning in their second language, the standards are depressingly unattainable. These young people are denied graduation in exchange for degradation and their teachers are thrust into spectacles of failure and shame, building up dams of frustration that will surely burst when vast numbers of pupils fail to gradu-ate. At best, the standards suit only those pupils in the middle, but they are applied insensitively to the rest.

Even in the middle, the regimes of teaching and learning that the standards have cre-ated are largely undesirable. Improving standards in the form of subject-based targets, or putting excessive emphases on literacy and numeracy, marginalizes the attention to per-sonal and social development that is the foundation of community, and eliminates inter-disciplinary attention to global education that is at the heart of cosmopolitan identity.

More than this, in standardized reform, teachers are treated and developed not as high skill, high capacity knowledge workers, but as compliant and closely monitored producers of standardized performances. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. For teachers, it’s the overexamined life that is the problem. Teachers with overexamined professional lives complain of eroded autonomy, lost creativity, restricted flexibility and constrained capacity to exercise their professional judgement. They keep their heads down, struggle along alone and withdraw from work with their colleagues. Imposed reform can create temporary surges of teamwork under pressure, but the sheer weight of demands means that this soon dissipates once the pressure is off. Professional community collapses, time to reflect evaporates, and the love of learning disappears. Teachers lose faith in their governments, grasp at opportunities for resignation and retire-ment, and even urge their own children not to follow in their footsteps. In our Ontario sample of 480 secondary school teachers, while only 28 per cent of teachers were over 50 years old, 73 per cent of the total sample stated that the effects of legislated reform had motivated them to seek retirement early. It was not only ageing teachers who were becoming tired, cynical and resistant to change.

Young teachers as well as old ones in our survey were also declaring their sad inten-tion to abandon their profession. After cataloguing the lack of funds, supplies, technol-ogy, professional development and time to participate in extra curricular activities, one teacher said that “as a young teacher I am disheartened by this environment and I will move on professionally to the private sector. There is no joy in teaching—only a paper


trail of grief.” Another indicated that “as a young teacher”, she would “leave for a better work environment if the current situation does not end”. A colleague at the same school similarly said, “I am a relatively young teacher but am seriously considering another profession or part-time teaching. It’s a shame because I love to teach.” The saddest comment of all came from a relatively new teacher:

As a relatively new teacher, I am seriously concerned about the future of education in this province both for pupils and as a profession. I never thought that I would regret my current career path but I do and wish I would have done something else with my three degrees (BA, B.Ed., MA). There is no joy in being told that you are a no good, freeloading fat cat for six years run-ning. I surely wouldn’t wish this profession on my children nor other family members. I love working with children but not with this government. How can you encourage and attract good (newcomers) in a time of shortage with a government like the one currently in power? I would retire tomorrow if I could but Hallowe’en 2026 will not be here soon enough! Eight years ago, I never thought that I would think that way. Unfortunately, I am jaded, tired and disillusioned with what this profession has to offer. I wish I would have written the LSAT (Law Degree Qualifying Test) in ‘92 because it was easier to get into Law school than Teacher’s College. This is a worst case scenario that I had no vision of in 1992!!

This was not the only teacher to say she would not counsel her own children to join the profession. Seventy-eight per cent of the sample overall indicated that since the start of Secondary School Reform, they would be less likely to advise their own children to go into teaching, hinting at a more widespread crisis and challenge facing many state school systems and their teaching professions where there are signs of a mass exodus from teaching related to disillutionment as well as demographic turnover of teachers in the profession.

-V-Standardized educational reform is as valuable for a vigorous knowledge economy and a strong civil society as locusts are for a cornfield. Many governments, including those in England and Wales, many Australian states, Singapore and Japan are beginning to appreciate this, especially in the face of a teacher recruitment crisis and a need to attract able people back to and retain them within the profession. Some nations are trying to create more “earned autonomy”, flexibility and professional community for teachers who are doing well (DfES, 2001; Barber, 2001). These governments are following the research and advice of some school improvement advocates who recommend that effective schools do and should also operate as strong professional learning communi-ties (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Wineburg & Grossman, 2000; Hord, 1987; Louis & Kruse, 1995; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001). Professional learning communities in schools emphasize three key components: collaborative work and discussion among the school’s professionals; a strong and consistent focus on teaching and learning within that collaborative work; and gathering assessment and other data to inquire into and evalu-ate progress and problems over time (Newmann & Wehlage, 1995; King & Newmann,


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1999). Professional learning communities lead to strong and measurable improvements in pupils’ learning (Newmann & Wehlage, 1995; Little, 2001). Instead of bringing about “quick fixes” of superficial and evanescent change, they create and support sustainable improvements that last over time, because they build the professional skill and capacity to keep the school moving forward (Stoll, 1999; King & Newmann, 1999).

A strong professional learning community is a social process for turning information into knowledge. It brings together the knowledge, skills and dispositions of teachers in a school or across schools to promote shared learning and improvement. It is a piece of social ingenuity based on the principle that in Fullan’s words “new ideas, knowledge creation, inquiry and sharing are essential to solving learning problems in a rapidly changing society” (Fullan, 2001). Professional learning communities promote and pre-sume key knowledge society attributes such as teamwork, inquiry and continuous learn-ing. They work best when they are combined with cultures of caring and are grounded in long term relationships of trust, foundations of security and commitments to active care among teachers and others—as Teaching in the Knowledge Society illustrates in a case description of a school deliberately established as a learning community. But profes-sional learning communities are neither soppy nor sappy enclaves of easy agreement. They demand what I call a “grown up” profession with grown-up professional norms of teaching where teachers are as much at ease with demanding adults as they are with problem children; where professional disagreement is embraced and enjoyed rather than avoided; where conflict is seen as a necessary part of professional learning, not a fatal act of betrayal (Hargreaves, 2002; forthcoming).

-Vi-However, professional learning communities are not an attractive improvement strategy for policy makers and school leaders who face pressures and demands for quick results in raising achievement levels. They do not fit well with standardized testing regimes or highly prescriptive curriculum frameworks when teachers or leaders do not yet have the minimal levels of expertise on which a professional learning community might be built (McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001). In these conditions, policy makers and administrators have turned to another strategy of what I call performance training sects. Performance training sects are based on strongly asserted claims that particular teaching practices are highly effective for improving pupil learning, and that there are proven methods to manage the educational change process effectively. Thus, many recent large-scale reform strategies combine a strong insistence on performance standards and prescribed classroom techniques, with measures to reculture teachers’ working relationships more collaboratively. Examples include Robert Slavin’s high profile Success For All programme which involves more than 1600 schools worldwide, and England’s National Literacy and Numeracy Strategy. The main components of these large-scale initiatives include:

• Making pedagogy the central focus of improvement efforts• Concentrating attention on high-profile areas, especially literacy and numeracy• setting ambitious targets for improved achievement results across the whole sys-

tem that will produce large gains with rapid success• Giving particular priority to low achieving pupils in order to narrow the achievement


gap between pupils from advantaged and less advantaged homes• Expecting all pupils to achieve higher standards (with greater support for those

who need extra help)—no excuses, no delays• Providing clearly defined, closely prescribed and sometimes tightly scripted pro-

grammes for teachers to follow that ensure compliance and consistency • Providing intensive training for teachers in workshops and summer institutes in the

core priorities, to establish large-scale competence in them• Creating a strong and generous support structure of trainers, coordinators and con-

sultants to work with teachers on implementing the priorities within their schools• Providing intensive one-to-one peer coaching support for teachers within the class-

room, on the basis of the evidence that this is one of the key factors that gets more teachers to use and persist with the change over time

• Insisting that headteachers become directly involved in all relevant training activi-ties within their school

• Having teachers examine achievement data together in order to make adjustments in their instruction where necessary

• Aligning the improvements in teaching and learning with the evaluation and testing system

• Involving parents and the community in supporting their children’s learning within the selected initiative.

The emphasis is on providing the pressure and support to train teachers intensively in a limited number of priorities that will deliver rapid and significant increases in measured learning performances for all pupils.

Performance training sects have undoubtedly yielded key benefits for pupils and teachers. First, almost all the initiatives have shown significant early success in improv-ing pupils achievement results, including narrowing the achievement gap between pupils from different social backgrounds (Fullan, 2001). Second, the reforms have led teachers and schools to treat literacy and numeracy seriously when this had not always been the case (Earl & Leithwood, 2002). Third, the achievement gains have challenged the views of some teachers that their poor or minority pupils could not learn to significantly higher standards, and for the first time, many teachers have started to believe that all their pupils have the capacity to learn (Datnow, Hubbard & Mehan, 2002), and have then become more receptive to further professional learning. Fourth, the scripted materi-als and strong support structures can benefit teachers beginning their careers, uncertified or underqualified teachers who work in poorer districts, poorly paid and trained teachers in less developed countries, and other teachers whose knowledge, skills and overall expertise are weak or underdeveloped (Datnow, Hubbard & Mehan, 2002). A tightly driven programme of pedagogical change provides these teachers with a repertoire of strategies that is inalienably theirs for life, and that can provide a strong platform for further improvement.

However, while performance training sects might get quick results, they are less successful in securing sustainable improvement. In December 2001, England’s early gains in literacy scores as a result of its National Literacy project suddenly reached a plateau. Tightly regulated regimes of performance training also achieve less success at


21


the secondary level where pupils’ learning is more complex, as is their school as an organization (Fullan, 2001). In England, improving secondary school literacy is more challenging than in the case of younger children. When literacy skills become more sophisticated, performance training regimes seem to have less dramatic effects.

Second, the repeated stress on literacy and numeracy in these programmes, draws attention and support away from other areas of the curriculum such as social stud-ies, arts or citizenship where critical thinking, creating and applying knowledge and other core competencies of the knowledge society are typically given greater emphasis. Performance training sects may therefore imperil more complex knowledge society objec-tives in the long-run.

Third, are the effects on teachers. Many teachers dislike teaching highly prescriptive programmes (Datnow, Hubbard & Mehan, 2002). Even when they acknowledge the benefits for pupils, they dislike losing their classroom discretion by being locked into an instructional strait-jacket. They feel less satisfied, less professional, less motivated to teach overall. Galton (2000) argues that even if it is effective for pupils, mandating pedagogical change by force is undesirable since it can damage teachers’ long term commitments to their work. This is a key point in a period of recruitment and retention crises in teaching.

Though some teachers do like to have their teaching spelled out for them (Earl & Leithwood, 2002), pandering to this preference runs the risk of recycling professional dependency on the external authority of bureaucrats, on scripted texts, or on the “incon-trovertible” results of research. In performance training sects, there is little opportunity for promoting continuous professional learning among reflective teachers who can exercise discretionary judgement. The evangelical nature of performance training sects deprives teachers of the opportunity to participate in sophisticated professional communities of continuous learning. For all their technical complexity and their sophisticated systems of mentoring and support, performance training sects make support look more like suffoca-tion. They put the sin into synergy!

-Vii-There is growing recognition in the field of school improvement that ‘one size doesn’t fit all’ (Hopkins, 2001). Different kinds of schools and systems need differing ways of tackling improvement. The question arises whether professional learning communities and performance training sects might offer complementary not competing approaches to change.

Sophisticated professional learning communities seem to work best with high capac-ity teachers in high capacity and often affluent systems, where teachers are highly skilled and qualified, the schools are at least already reasonably effective, leaders are capable of motivating and engaging their teachers, and there are sufficient resources to provide teachers and schools with the time and flexibility they need to work together profes-sionally (McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001). By contrast, improvement through performance training seems to yield results in poor low, capacity systems, where large numbers of teachers are uncertified and under-skilled, where schools have a record of poor perform-ance and many teachers have lost belief in their capacity to make a difference, where too


many leaders see themselves as managers more than instructional leaders, and where resources have been scarce or spread too thinly across too many initiatives (Datnow, Hubbard & Mehan, 2002).

This flexible differentiation of approaches to school improvement and professional growth can easily turn into deep-seated divisiveness between rich and poor communi-ties. Recent English educational policy proposes that schools which are performing well according to inspection evidence and test results, will enjoy “earned autonomy” in terms of freedom to manouvre beyond prescribed curriculum programmes (DfES, 2001; Barber, 2001). However, because the United Kingdom has one of the most stubborn ties between educational achievement and pupils’ social background, and still operates a competitive market system of school choice which reinforces these ties (OECD, 2002), “earned autonomy” will be enjoyed mainly by schools and teachers in middle class communities. Meanwhile, schools and their teachers who are categorized as failing or close to failing remain tied to prescribed programmes, endlessly intrusive monitoring and inspection, and performance training sects in mandated methods of teaching.

Separate communities, separate teachers, separate development—this is nothing less than an apartheid of professional development and school improvement. Schools and teachers in relatively affluent communities enjoy all the benefits of professional learning networks and communities. Their self-skilling teachers engage in professional learning teams to produce high-skill pupils who create systems thinking and receive excellent preparation to work in the higher levels of “weightless work” in the knowledge economy (Leadbeater, 2001).

Meanwhile, schools and teachers in poor communities, in the desolate sprawl of housing estates or the Fourth world of less developed nations, struggle in the shadow of impending failure—watchful of test scores, fearful of intervention and with a bellyful of imposed restrictions and requirements. These teachers and schools are thrown into performance training sects where their pedagogical options and professional learning choices are restricted. They teach the basic skills of maths and literacy that get their pupils to improve up to a point in primary school only to see their achievements plateau in the secondary school years. These schools prepare pupils to participate in very dif-ferent sectors of the knowledge economy. Pupils learn not to create knowledge, develop ingenuity or solve unfamiliar problems in flexible formats. Their destiny is to be literate and numerate enough to serve and support the “weightless work” of their affluent superi-ors in restaurants, tourist hotels, health spas, and other service work where understand-ing instructions, communicating obsequiously and urging others to turn over or have a nice day, have far greater importance than inventiveness or ingenuity. In the name of “one size doesn’t fit all”, these separate systems and forms of separate development prepare pupils from more and less privileged backgrounds respectively for two very different sides of the knowledge economy: those who create the knowledge economy, and those who merely cater to it.

In Bauman’s (1998) terms, pupils, teachers and parents in affluent, high achieving communities become the “tourists” of knowledge society schools who enjoy flexibility, autonomy, freedom of movement, networking and mobility as they are drawn towards magnets of excellence, opportunity and professional community. By contrast, pupils,


23


teachers and parents in poorer, low-achieving communities become the “vagabonds”

and “vagrants” of the knowledge society—immigrant or working class pupils and their

casualized, uncertified or demoralized teachers, whose mobility must be monitored and

movements must be watched through endless surveillance and evaluations; whose

learning is ordered, restricted, and regulated as they are left behind in the “enforced

localization” of the system.

If we want to prepare all young people to have the chance to be among the most

successful workers within the knowledge society as well as decent citizens beyond it,

this new social geography of divisive improvement that offers “business class” forms of

professional learning communities to the advantaged, and imposes “economy class” per-

formance training sects on the rest, is one of our most imminent and disturbing threats.

-Viii-

It is time to consider more sophisticated strategies for improvement that combine ele-

ments of performance training and professional community in almost all schools—so

that critical dialogue exists from the outset and prevents performance training from

becoming a compliant sect. Some elements of training almost always need to be com-

bined with those of learning community and vice-versa. How this balance works and

in what proportion depends on the type of school and its state of development. Critical

dialogue is never something we should leave until later; it belongs at the beginning too.

Otherwise, performance training sects might mark the end of improvement in poor com-

munities rather than its beginning.

However, alongside all this attention to strategies of improvement in the context of

a knowledge society, it’s important to remember that many of the basic challenges of

schools and teaching in poor communities are not due to lacking strategies of improve-

ment, but of having to endure the scourge of impoverishment which undermines many

nations’ and communities’ capacity to improve at all. As a matter of economic devel-

opment and social justice, and in order to avert the worst human consequences of

the knowledge society, it is vital to begin redistributing economic and social resources

across the society to those who have the greatest need. We will never have a fair nor fully

effective knowledge society, and we will never draw on everyone’s collective intelligence

until the poor can enjoy generously equipped schools, highly qualified teachers and

extensive outside support just as much as their more comfortable neighbours.

The knowledge society is beckoning. It is time that everyone in education is granted

their right to engage with it. Ingenuity, investment and integrity are required from all of us.

Otherwise insecurity, and worse, will be all that we have, and no less than we deserve.

This article was abridged and adopted from Andy Hargreaves' Teaching in the

Knowledge Society. Buckingham: Open University Press and New York: Teachers College Press.


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Brown, P., & Lauder, H. (2001). Capitalism and social progress: The future of society in a global economy. Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave.

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Castells, M. (1998). End of millennium. Oxford: Blackwell.

Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. (1999). Teacher learning communities. Review of Research in Education, 24, 24-32.

Coleman, J. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94(Supplement), 595-620.

Datnow, A., Hubbard, L., & Mehan, H. (2002). Extending educational reform: From one school to many. London: Falmer/Routledge Press.

Department for Education and Skills. (2001). Achieving success. London: HMSO.

Dinham, S., & Scott, C. (1997). The teacher 2000 project: A study of teacher motivation and health. Perth: University of Western Sydney, Nepean.

Drucker, P. (1993). Post-capitalist society. New York: Harper Collins.

Earl, L., Watson, N., & Torrance, N. (2002). Front row seats: Results from the evaluation of the English national literacy and numeracy strategies. Journal of Educational Change, 3(5).

Fukuyama, F. (1999). The great disruption: Human nature and the reconstitution of social order. New York:: Free Press.

Fullan, M. (2001). Leading in a culture of change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Wiley.

Galton, M. (2000). ‘Dumbing down’ on classroom standards: The perils of a technician’s approach to peda-gogy. The Journal of Educational Change, 1(2), 199-204.

Gerwitz, S., Ball, S. J., & Bowe, R. (1995). Markets, choice and equity in education. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Giddens, A. (2000). Runaway world: How globalization is reshaping our lives. London: Profile Books.

Handy, C. (2001). The elephant and the flea: Looking backwards to the future. London: Hutchinson.

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Hargreaves, a. (2002). The emotional geographies of teachers’ relations with colleagues. International Journal of Educational Research, 35, 503-527.

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Hargreaves, A., Earl, L., & Ryan, J. (1996). Schooling for change: Reinventing education for early adoles-cents. Philadelphia: Falmer Press.

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Helsby, G. (1999). Changing teachers’ work: The reform of secondary schooling. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Hopkins, D. (2001). School improvement for real. London: Routledge Falmer.


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Hord, S. M. (1987). Evaluating educational innovation. London and New York: Croom Helm.

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27

a quality ContExt

driVing about mElbournE it is hard not to notice some schools promoting the number of students achieving very high outcomes in their VCE or the high proportion of their Year 12 cohort who progress to tertiary study. On the surface of it, one is tempted to judge these schools as having quality, providing quality educational outcomes for their students. We want to argue that these claims are really only significant if they are read against other data that measures where their students were at before they came to the school. Taking on students whose prior experience all but predisposes them towards educational ‘high achievement’ and then helping them reach these lofty goals is an achievement of one sort. But taking on kids whose prior experiences all but guar-antee they will experience educational failure and helping them reverse that trend, is an achievement of quite a different magnitude.

From this perspective, the true measure of ‘quality’ teaching can be found on the margins of educational endeavour: if we can make a difference in those spaces that have proven most difficult to transform, then we can truly make claims about the quality of our work. We would argue, therefore, that quality learning’ environments—and the quality teaching that supports them—have one thing in common: They aspire to have a demonstrably positive impact upon the full range of students they involve.

lEoniE roWan & Chris bigum

quality tEaChing For

quality learning: CCts and transformative

Classrooms


This brief paper outlines the ways in which the Quality Learning Research Priority Area at Deakin University (the QL RPA) has taken up the challenge of researching issues of educational quality—in particular, the emphasis placed on ensuring that all attempts to design, assess or evaluate the quality of educational proceedings take into consideration the full range of factors currently impacting on the business of teaching. This includes issues relating to ever-increasing student diversity and relentless tech-nological change. Beginning with a brief introduction to the Quality Learning Research Priority Area, this paper will then illustrate the program’s key principles with reference to the ways in which ‘quality teaching for quality learning’ might be achieved in relation-ship to the use of computing and communications technologies (CCTs).

quality lEarning and quality tEaChingFor the past four years, the QL RPA at Deakin University has worked to develop a framework for designing, implementing and evaluating, quality learning environments that are more responsive to the complexity of the contemporary environment faced by teachers than are some of the more traditional, business-inspired takes on quality and quality assurance. In undertaking this work, the QL RPA recognised that if educators are seriously committed to the production of quality teaching and learning frameworks, then we need to focus firstly and consistently on the particular groups of learners who have had (and continue to enjoy) the most regular and consistent access to quality teach-ing, quality learning and quality educational outcomes. This kind of reflection leads inevitably to the fact that while some groups of students seem to routinely succeed in schooling environments, other groups of students, just as consistently, do not.

Contemporary patterns of educational success and failure (and all their associated social, physical and emotional consequences) remain frighteningly similar to those of 20 years ago. Socio-economic status, cultural and ethnic background, first language, ability/disability, geographical location, sexuality and gender continue to shape kids’ experiences of schooling. And while schools are generally acknowledged to be ‘adding value’ to children’s lives, research indicates that they make approximately the same kind of difference to all students. So if a child from a working class family enters school with, for instance, 20 per cent less ‘reading’ ability than another child of a similar age from a middle class family, by the time they complete several years of schooling both will generally have improved in measurable ‘ability’ but the gap between them will, in most cases, have stayed the same.

The next section of this paper outlines the way in which one particular educational initiative—generally labelled the Knowledge Producing Schools (KPS) project—has taken up the project of creating quality teaching for quality learning in a small number of schools throughout Queensland and Victoria, and the ways in which they make use of CCTs in the process.

quality tEaChing and CCtsTaking up the challenge of aspiring to have a positive impact upon a diverse student cohort allows one to review the traditional uses of CCTs in a particular way and draw attention to the assumptions and gaps in these traditions.


29

For example, while it may sound a little harsh, it is nevertheless possible to argue that schools have historically been in the business of finding educationally useful things to do with the CCT products sold to them by various corporations. In this context, ‘qual-ity’ has commonly been associated with such things as the quantity of ‘educational technologies’ found within a setting, or with evidence that these technologies are actually being used by teachers with students. There is no need, within this mindset, to identify the ways technologies are used, the educational patterns of success and failure that they do or do not engage with, nor the possibilities that the use of CCTs may actually reproduce patterns of educational disadvantage.

Along similar lines it can be argued that since the early 1980s, as each wave of CCT products ‘hit’ schools, fresh claims were made about the capacity of these products to function as a ‘learning technology’: but again, there was no routine attention given to the particular kinds of learners whose learning might be helped nor to those who may not be in any sense engaged by the technology.

In addition to this, the pressure on schools and teachers to be seen to be making use, almost any use, of ‘cutting edge’ technologies has generated a culture of activities that are ‘schooled’ versions of expert use of CCTs outside of schools. In keeping with a curriculum which is safe and reproductive, students experience well intentioned but often pale imitations of external practices that draw attention inwards rather than to develop-ments outside school. The schooling or domestication of these technologies is a gener-ally held view in the research literature. It goes a long way towards accounting for the limited impact CCTs have had in schools over the past twenty five years.

Taking up the key ideas developed by the Quality Learning Research Priority Area which challenge educators to focus on the extent to which any educational practice aims to have a demonstratively positive impact upon those it involves, some key questions quickly emerge. Which groups of students (and teachers) have truly benefited from the addition of CCTs into classrooms? Which individuals or groups have been best equipped to capitalise upon opportunities associated with CCTs. Who has most frequently been included in CCT-based initiatives? Who has been excluded? Whose needs have been identified? Whose have been ignored? What differences are there in terms of what kinds of students learn what kinds of skills? What kinds of social relationships or patterns are recognised? In what ways are the patterns of disadvantaged experienced by students acknowledged or challenged by the initiatives? In what ways are they reproduced or, indeed, exacerbated?

Even a cursory analysis of literature focused on both CCTs and educational disadvan-tage quickly makes it clear that schools that use CCTs more than others do not have any demonstrable advantage when it comes to improving educational outcomes for students most at risk of failure. Indeed, there is significant research to suggest that while CCTs influence how some classrooms operate, they do not necessarily change outcomes for students.

And yet technology—like social disadvantage—is clearly a reality with which ‘qual-ity’ teachers need to engage. So how can teachers intervene in patterns of educational success and failure in ways that respond creatively and sustainably to the realities of technologically mediated life? The next section of the paper outlines one kind of

lEoniE roWan & Chris bigumquality teaching for quality learning: ccts and transformative classrooms


response; a response that makes some substantial steps in terms of recognising and responding to the characteristics of contemporary life through an emphasis—not on technologies—but on the relationships they can produce.

knoWlEdgE ProduCing sChoolsMichael Schrage (2000) makes the point that: “To say that the Internet is about ‘infor-mation’ is a bit like saying that ‘cooking’ is about oven temperatures; it’s technically accurate but fundamentally untrue.” The biggest impact that digital technologies are having and will continue to have, argues Schrage, are on the relationships between people and between people and organisations. This idea that CCTs or indeed any technology can be seen in terms of the relationships they affect or mediate (Sproull and Kiesler, 1991), is important because of the emphasis or mindset that sees rela-tionships rather than information or technology itself as important. This is a significant shift. It means that rather than worrying about finding useful things to do with each new set of CCTs that finds its way into schools, the focus becomes one of examining the changes in relationships that develop around the deployment of new technologies. This allows, in turn, attention to be focused on the relationships between diverse students and experiences of educational success and failure.

We turn now to the description of one form of this relationship centred enquiry. In recent years, a small research agenda informed by this view has been developed at a small number of schools in Queensland and Victoria. Dubbed the knowledge produc-ing schools or KPS agenda (www.deakin.edu.au/education/lit/kps/), it represents attempts by schools to examine new, knowledge producing relationships with their local communities. In doing so, they have moved beyond what we have described in various contexts as a ‘fridge door’ mindset for student work. (We use ‘fridge door’ as a shorthand to indicate the normal pattern of knowledge production in schools, that is: student completes an assignment, a teacher assesses it, the assignment is taken home by the student and published on the fridge door for a few days before parents discretely discard it.) KPS projects always end with the production of a product or generation of a performance that exists beyond the teacher/student/family relationship. An important part of negotiating the production of such knowledge is that the product or performance is something that students see as being valued by the consumer or audience of their work. An important aspect of this work is drawing on local expertise to ensure that the quality of the work is of the highest standard achievable by students. The resultant work is taken seriously and the students know it. These are not teacher driven, artificial projects in which students are given a safe role in solving a problem. They are real projects with actual outcomes: Sometimes they are given to students as problems to solve, in other cases they are identified by the students. In both cases the work responds to ‘real world issues’. It is risky business.

For example: As a result of the students’ reputation at one KPS school for doing good quality video work, grade five students were invited to prepare video interviews of locals in a nearby mining town which had obtained funding to install touch screen tourism information in kiosks around the town. The funding agency also employed a Sydney-based firm to produce material, not confident that the student work would ‘cut


31

it’. The student work was chosen and praised by the various stakeholders for its quality and freshness.

There are numerous stories from these schools. While CCTs are used in some projects, they are never the focus. The focus is on the new knowledge relationships either within or beyond the school. We know for instance that once students have worked on a couple of such projects they develop a strong sense of agency, a confidence to act in the world. We also know that this style of work is highly effective at re-engaging the disengaged and in catering for the broad and diverse set of talents and skills available in these classrooms.

quality tEaChing For quality lEarningTo conclude, this brief introduction to Knowledge Producing Schools—and the ways in which it meets the QL RPA agenda of having a demonstratively positive impact on the lives of those they involve—suggests the following kinds of characteristics of quality teaching with regard to CCTs. Quality teachers, in this context:

• Recognise the diversity of the student population and the persistence of patterns of success and failure

• Acknowledge the diversity of the category ‘technology’ and the multiple ways in which students negotiate technologies in their day to day lives

• Seek to create learning opportunities that maximise student learning through engaging them in ‘real world’ projects, valued within and beyond the boundaries of the school

• Understand the role that technologies can play in establishing and sustaining crea-tive relationships between learners and the community

• Value the role that new relationships can play in beginning to transform marginal-ised kids’ relationships with knowledge, with schools and with communities.

The KPS agenda is no more a magic solution to deeply entrenched patterns of edu-cational success and failure than any other project. Its strength, however, is that it is able to begin from a position that recognises diverse student backgrounds, experiences and needs, and uses this context for designing educational initiatives that engage these diverse students in a rich array of externally valued projects and activities.

rEFErEnCEs

Schrage, M. (2000). The Relationship Revolution. Retrieved 26th January, 2000, from www.ml.com/woml/forum/relation.htm

Sproull, L., & Kiesler, S. (1991). Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization. Cambridge, Ma.: The MIT Press.

lEoniE roWan & Chris bigumquality teaching for quality learning: ccts and transformative classrooms

33

thE 2002 National Report to Parliament on Indigenous Education and Training states that 87.5 per cent of all Indigenous students in Australia attend government schools. There is considerable diversity across this cohort, with most schools having an Indigenous population of between 0.1 per cent and 5 per cent of their total school population. 5.3 per cent of all Indigenous students attend schools in Victoria—the state with the third smallest population as a percentage of all Indigenous students, behind the Northern Territory (4.9 per cent) and the Australian Capital Territory (0.9 per cent). Between them, Queensland and New South Wales have over 50 per cent of the total Indigenous student population.

Department of Education, Science and Training statistics indicate that, against all benchmarks used to assess student performance, including literacy, numeracy, reten-tion and completion, Indigenous students do not perform as well as other students. We know that there have been some improvements over the past years, for example, from 1999 to 2002, the Year 12 retention rate increased from 34.7 per cent to 38 per cent. However, comparisons with non-Indigenous retention rates to Year 12 in the same years (1999: 73.2 per cent; 2002: 76.3 per cent) show just how catastrophic the problem is. Indeed, when compared with non-Indigenous students, against all indicators the ‘gaps’

quality EduCators Produce quality

outcomes

darCEl moylE


are significant. We also know that the gaps become greater as the age group progresses through school, particularly with literacy and numeracy indicators.

It is with this in mind that the AEU Federal Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Committee initiated a campaign around the issue of quality education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, including organising two Indigenous education seminars, titled Quality Educators Produce Quality Outcomes and Quality Public Education for Our People’s Future. Participants at the first seminar, held in Hobart in January 2004, discussed what they believed were some of the characteristics of a ‘quality’ educator.

This discussion was initiated to enable members to debate and detail aspects of the ‘quality educator’ debate in relation to the AEU’s Indigenous Studies for Teachers cam-paign, which will be outlined briefly later in this paper. The topic of the second seminar, held in Perth in January 2005, was a direct outcome of participants’ responses from the Hobart seminar, where a consensus was formed that, whilst ‘quality educators produce quality outcomes’ it is a ‘quality system’ with ‘quality processes’ that produce quality educators. It was decided overwhelmingly, that one part of the discussion could not be had without the other.

This paper will deal primarily with the outcomes of the Hobart Seminar, where discus-sions were based around the characteristics of individual educators and included some systemic responsibilities, but will also outline aspects of the AEU’s work in relation to the Indigenous Studies for Teachers Campaign and relate to discussions drawn from the outcomes of the Perth seminar on ‘Quality Public Education for Our People’s Futures’.

Whilst we understand that the notion of a ‘quality’ educator is somewhat controver-sial, we also know that this is a topical issue which is not likely to fall off the agenda in the near future. Many educators fear that discussion in this area may lead to an imposed, punitive approach to the development and implementation of the concept of ‘quality’ as it applies to the teaching process. Nevertheless, the debate on teacher quality is now well established, and we believe that teachers must engage in it. The debate to date, however, has been characterised by discourses that are relevant to mainstream education provi-sion, with very little attention drawn to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education.

One of the aspects of the AEU’s work which centres on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education is our work on Indigenous Studies for Teachers. This campaign focus area has come from members, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, who have informed us of the significant impacts that learning about aspects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and histories, and issues to do with teaching and learning Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, has made on their teaching practice.

One of the major features of this campaign is the focus on ensuring that all teachers and educators in the government system receive access to a comprehensive program of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies, both in their pre-service teacher educa-tion program, and as an ongoing in-service program to support their teaching practice. The AEU is currently campaigning for State and Territory Governments to illustrate their commitment in this area by mandating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies as a condition of employment for teachers.

Stakeholders have responded in varying ways to this campaign. In Victoria, the AEU convened a workshop on the issue in late 2004, where it was decided to form a working


35

party which has developed and will submit the following recommendation to the Victorian Institute of Teaching:

That all pre-service programs ensure that all teacher graduates have par-ticpated in a range of educational experiences that have:• Been developed in conjunction with local Indigenous communities and/or

Indigenous peak bodies• Raised the awareness of historical, cultural, socio-economic and educa-

tional issues concerning Australia’s Indigenous peoples• Focused on appropriate pedagogy and curriculum for Indigenous stu-

dents.

(Indigenous Studies in Pre-Service Education Network, Victoria, February, 2005).It is hoped that the work done in Hobart, 2004 will contribute to the debate on

teacher/educator ‘quality’ in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and the development of a better understanding of some of the characteristics that may be required for a quality educator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.

In detailing the characteristics, of a ‘quality educator’, workshop discussions in Hobart included listing many characteristics that participants deemed valuable for indi-vidual educators. There were contributions which also encapsulated the role of a ‘quality system’, as it was thought that the development of individual characteristics occurred in the context of the educational system they worked within. “Just because someone is an excellent teacher in one environment does not mean they will be in the next,” said one participant. The importance of supportive school leadership was thought to be integral to the fostering of skills.

Workshop participants believed that quality educators of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students should have cultural and cross-cultural understandings, including an awareness of their own culture and how this impacts on the educator’s ability to work in a cross-cultural setting. Along with this, an awareness of racism and how it impacts on the development of personal attitudes, such as the harbouring of low expectations. They should also have an understanding and acceptance of Indigenous culture at both a local and global level, including the ability to work within a local context, embrace local languages and to support local cultural values and knowledges.

They should have high level communication skills, including the ability to negotiate with parents and other community stakeholders. They need to have excellent listen-ing, speaking skills and a sense of humour. They should also have the ability to work in and within a community which encapsulates the not only the physical aspect of locality, but also the social capacity to interact and engage with community members. Bringing the community experience in to the educational context and assisting students to develop a strong sense of their Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander identity was seen as imperative.

The ability to work as a member of a team and a broader collegial network was seen as integral, including the ability to provide support for beginning teachers, and establish networks across the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander educational and broader com-munities. They would need to have the ability to work collaboratively with Aboriginal and

darCEl moylEquality educators produce quality outcomes


Torres Strait Islander Education Workers and other ‘constants’ in the school.It was decided that a high level of professionalism and integrity was required,

including a high level of industry knowledge and application of the tools of the ‘craft’ of teaching such as developing curricula and improved pedagogical practice. The establishment of high expectations for themselves and their students was considered a necessity. They should also access professional development opportunities and use these as an opportunity to develop skills. This would lead to the development of a high level of self and professional awareness including the ability to reflect on, evaluate and improve one’s performance.

As mentioned previously, it has been recognised that these skills do not occur in isolation from the system, and there were a range of systemic supports that participants thought would enhance the development of skills and knowledge. These included: opportunities to spend time in an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community as a component of pre-service training; an induction program which would allow educators time to meet and experience a community; provision of relief workers so that there is time and space for people to formally reflect on, evaluate and improve their practice; the establishment of formal mentoring relationships or collegial networks where people can find information and support if needed; Professional Development that is designed in response to educators needs; and the development of internships to enable an extended experience for beginning teachers in structured and supported way.

The role of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Workers (AIEWs) was considered crucial in the fostering of a collegiate relationship, as these educators are often the only constant in the school setting, particularly in remote areas where teacher turn over rates are high. It was therefore thought that the building of status through job security and proper remuneration for AIEWs whose salaries are in some instances based on CDEP, was imperative. This was also a consideration for contract teachers. AIEWs also require access to quality training and professional development funded by Departments. They need proper relief backups to enable them to take up training opportunities both within and outside the school. It was considered that there was a need to make sure people are paid for all the work they do instead of a built in expectation of unpaid overtime.

There was also discussion on the issue of ‘who determines quality’ and the processes that should be established to monitor and measure these determinants. Discussion on this issue was based around roles of specific groups and agencies and their interrelationships. There was concern about the punitive aspects of monitor-ing individuals, and it was thought monitoring should focus on a quality process-resources, team, curriculum, community engagement-and not on individual teachers, as teachers can only aim for the best outcomes for individual students.

It was suggested that strong relationships and alliances need to be built between the community, employer and Union in the development, establishment and monitoring of such a process. As the school community is broad-teachers, admin staff, students, parents and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities-the process must be multi faceted and include feedback from all stakeholders. All participants should be


37

empowered to effectively contribute to and participate in the process. There is a need to build a range of indicators for individual educators to develop

their own quality skills. These measures should be holistic in order to determine suc-cess of processes. It was thought that measuring standard educational outcomes was necessary to prove success but there was also a need to also measure outcomes out-side the norm. Whatever the process, there needs to be safe mechanisms established for feedback and reflections, as in some instances personality conflicts could present a problem in the implementation of an evaluation process. It was also suggested that parental conservatism in relation to innovative curriculum and pedagogies could present a barrier to improvement. There is a need to recognise the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students located in ‘mainstream’ schools where they are not in a majority, and the impacts of working in a racist context, both within the school and the broader community.

Following on from this issue was the issue of the types of support that should be offered to educators who are deemed to be ‘underperforming’. Discussions around this topic included the role of varying agencies in supporting individuals and implementing processes. Workshop feedback made little mention of punitive processes for underper-forming educators, concentrating instead on the need to develop sensitive procedures to address underperformance. It was felt that leadership played an important role in sup-porting individuals who are underperforming through the development of a school ethos of continual improvement.

Ensuring that ‘front-end’ strategies such as appropriate recruitment, selection and induction programs are in place were considered as imperative. These should be fol-lowed by strategies such as formal mentoring and access to further professional develop-ment. Preventative measures such as the development and introduction of strategies to support the retention of quality educators were also considered to be crucial. For educa-tors working in remote communities, it was suggested they may need several weeks to get past initial culture shock and to learn whether they are likely to succeed working in such a context. The union should provide support for performance management proc-esses and be actively engaged in them.

In conclusion, issues around the topic of ‘quality teaching’ are contentious and are best resolved when they are introduced through intensive debate in order to foster owner-ship by the profession, rather than imposed by ‘the system’. Many of the suggestions outlined above are not new, nor are they contentious from a policy perspective. They are though in need of reinvigoration if educational outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are to be improved.

Research suggests (MCEETYA 2001) that the knowledge and performance of teach-ers is critical to the educational performance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. It also tells us that, where a culture of low expectations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students pervades, the production of low outcomes is the consequence (Education Queensland 2004). It is disappointing that the national debate on ‘teacher quality’ has been silent in relation to Indigenous education, given the policy commit-ments of governments at all levels to prioritise and improve outcomes for this cohort of students. The AEU must work to ensure that the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait

darCEl moylEquality educators produce quality outcomes


Islander students are at the forefront of this debate in the future. It is hoped that this paper can provide some impetus for this to occur.

rEFErEnCEs

Department of Education, Science and Training (2003) National Report to Parliament on Indigenous Education and Training, 2002, Department of Education, Science and Training, Canberra.

Education Queensland (2004) Indigenous education: A Ministerial Council for Educational Renewal Report to the Minister for Education and the Minister for the Arts from http://education.qld.gov.au/publication/pro-duction/reports/pdfs/indigenousreport.pdf (accessed 15.10.04 - 7.42am);

Indigenous Studies in Pre-Service Education Network (2005) Rationale for the Inclusion of Indigenous Studies in Teacher Education Pre-Service Courses, Australian Education Union, Unpublished Document.

MCEETYA (2001) Education of Teachers of Indigenous Students in Early Childhood Services and Schools from www.mceetya.edu.au/pdf/educationofteachersinecs.pdf (accessed 15.10.04 - 7.45am)

39

in oCtobEr 2002 I wa s being warmly welcomed by my colleagues in Paris, France to their preschool educational system école maternelle, at Glacière, realising a long held professional desire to view early childhood education from the European perspective.

It was a journey that had commenced many years previous when a link was estab-lished between the Wangaratta West Kindergarten and École Maternelle Glacière. This link enabled us to open up the world to our children at the kindergarten, and in return gave the French children a view of our Australian culture; many creative endeavours were exchanged between Wangaratta and Paris during that time.

It was with great trepidation and excitement that I entered the école (school) on 7 October 2002. Here was I an Aussie from the bush in a Parisian inner city education set-ting not more than a 20 minute Metro ride from the Eiffel Tower. With only a few phrases of French I was welcomed with much openness, warmth and generosity by my French colleagues, all whom had a wonderful versatile grasp of the English language.

The next two weeks became the most inspiring weeks of my life, both professionally and personally—attending École Maternelle Glacière, riding the Metro to and from work and filling my days with the presence and pleasure of working with engaging French children. All the time sharing and exchanging ideas and philosophies about early child-

glEnys JaCkson

Wangaratta to Paris: Early Childhood EduCation PErsPECtiVEs


hood education with my French colleagues.What became obvious and palpable from the instant I began my placement there was

the importance placed upon a child’s early years of life by the French education system and indeed French culture. They have a firm belief that a child’s early years of learning are imperative to the rest of a child’s learning life and to add meaning to this belief all levels of government make a major commitment to this philosophically and financially.

French children and families enjoy a fully funded and well-resourced preschool edu-cation, which is the école maternelle system. Children are able to enter the école mater-nelle at the age of three for up to five hours per day, four days per week and stay within its confines until they are six years of age when they then move onto école élémentaire (primary school). This system allows the children three whole years to play and practice at the learning that is relevant to them, preparing them for the formal learning that is to come. It is an unhurried learning environment full of all the philosophies and practices that we in Australia would adhere to. It has a valid and valued role within the general education system and children and families flourish within it.

It is a far cry from our preschool system in Victoria which sits outside the education department, where funding is allocated on a per capita head principle, which requires further fundraising from parents to meet the expenses and then relies on the goodness of parent volunteers to run this system. Our system allows children to attend preschool for one year only, for a total of ten hours per week, where children need opportunities to engage in the learning that is relevant to them as well as prepare for the challenge of entering primary school. I had to agree with my French colleagues when they voiced their concern that such a system was not optimal for children’s current learning nor that in their future learning years. While this is true it must be acknowledged that preschools in Victoria make an extraordinary commitment to a child’s preschool year, but imagine what could be achieved if it was placed within the education system, funded equitably and had its perimeters expanded. Although valued by the families within our preschool communities the worth of preschool education has not the emphasis placed upon it that it truly and rightly deserves and many argue that it cannot do so until it is placed within the Victorian education system.

The greatest impact the fully funded école maternelle system brought to bear on early childhood education in Paris was the optimum position in which it placed early childhood teachers. The Parisian system, while catering to the total needs of children and families, at the same time unequivocally provided the école maternelle teachers with a level of support that ensured their quality of teaching. In this system the teachers are seen as the most vital link between a young child’s learning potential and their future early learning years. Therefore Parisian early childhood (or kindergarten/preschool) teachers have only one solid focus the educational, developmental needs of the children entrusted to their care. This is possible as there is:

• An école maternelle director who has a non-teaching position. Support for teachers with the theory and practice of early child pedagogy, liaison with parents/families, management responsibilities and work in unison with the Marie de Paris to ensure that the educational facility has all it needs is the director’s sole responsibility. It is not therefore the teachers who need to actively pursue these aspects; rather they


41

work as a team with and through the director to guarantee that they are in place• An école maternelle full-time ‘out of hours’ (lunch-times, end of day times,

Wednesdays and school holidays) care team attend to the children’s needs. The teachers can then attend to planning and preparation during the school day, knowing that children’s needs are being met by this qualified and non-qualified staff team

• A block of three weeks full time professional development each and every year for each teacher, the professional development ‘topics’ are arrived at by surveying the teachers. Teachers are then able to fully attend to serious and extended professional development that totally supports their teaching techniques, strategies and theory

• Educational professional consultants are readily available to support teacher’s requests, concerns. Providing a system that supports teacher’s professional needs and wants adequately

• The staff salaries are fully funded by la Ministère d'Éducation Nationale (a federal government department). The director of the école, parents, nor teachers them-selves have to concern themselves with the administration requirements of salaries and on-costs finances

• A staff team of ‘école assistants’ move between ‘classrooms’ attending to non-pro-fessional duties. For examples, caring for sick children, cleaning-up areas where children have been working, mopping floors etc. Teachers while working in unison with these staff members are able to have the children within their supervision as their main priority at all times.

There are many other examples of the support system in the Parisian école mater-nelle educational field that allow teachers to solely concentrate on teaching the children. As a consequent of these supports the école maternelle teacher’s quality of teaching is optimised, there is very little to distract her from the all-important task at hand, ensuring the children’s learning and developmental potentials are being met. It recognises that the educational role of a teacher should not be hindered nor obstructed by any aspect other than that which may inspire and grow his/her quality of teaching. A truly enlightening vision in comparison to the professional recognition and sustenance (or lack there of!) with which our ‘department’ of administration in Victoria provides!

The placement in France allowed me to see what was absolutely possible in a fully funded preschool education system, the value given to early childhood professionals, the eagerness of children and families in the learning process and the endless possibilities we can nurture children to achieve. It highlighted the tremendous role preschools fill in our society and how imperative they are to a child’s development. The whole inspiring experience has reaffirmed and reinvigorated the work I, along with my colleagues, seek to practice in our setting. We have a broader view of what ‘early childhood education’ can mean to our young children, that we should seek to nurture it before and beyond the official Victorian preschool year, through whatever methods are available to us. This at times is frustrating and exhaustive to achieve, due to the lengths we have to go to for success. Despite this already we are seeing the rewards that this commitment to a more comprehensive and seamless early childhood education can bring to children’s learn-ing potentials and how it will support them on their life long learning journey. We as

glEnys JaCksonfrom wangaratta to paris: early childhood education perspectives


professionals and the families in our kindergarten community are witness to tremendous growth and potential in the children’s learning. It is awe-inspiring and we revel in the differences we have been able to facilitate by embracing an educational perspective from the other side of the world and marrying it with our own. We ALL have much to gain.

Via the National Excellence in Teaching Awards (NEiTA), the Australian Scholarships Group (ASG) and the Commonwealth government along with the boundless support of the Wangaratta West Kindergarten committee of management and my fabulous col-leagues I was given an enormous privilege. One that has provided me with a level of professional development that will continue to influence all I do as long as I teach. It has re-inspired my commitment to the children of the Wangaratta West Kindergarten and the realm of early childhood education and how best to fulfill this commitment. Everyday, along with my dedicated colleagues, we work to ensure that each individual child reaches the individual potential that is theirs and that they rightly deserve. We do this in unison with our talented French colleagues across the ocean in an école maternelle not far from the Eiffel Tower, for in this commitment we are the same.

EColE matErnEllE, glaCiErE, Paris, FranCE at a glanCE• 100 Rue De La Glacière (Auguste Blanqui Boulevard), 13 Arrondissement.• Under the auspice of le Monde de l’Éducation (education deptartment) which is

totally governed by Mairie De Paris (local government).• Literal interpretation of the term ‘école maternelle’ is ‘the mother school’.• The école maternelle (infant school) is divided up into three different learning

sections: 1. La Petite section, 3 & 4 year olds2. La Moyenne section, 4 & 5 year olds3. La Grande section, 5 & 6 year olds.

• 150 children are enrolled over the three sections.• Each section contains two rooms, 25 children in each room; the petite section

rooms have dormitory rooms attached.• One director, six qualified early childhood teachers, one part-time ‘floating’ teacher,

several (unqualified) ancillary staff, one security guard and a fully staffed ‘out of hours care’ program are employed.

• Families drawn from a range of socio-economic and cultural backgrounds.• There is a high commitment to frequent communication between teachers, the école

maternelle and parents/families.• The école maternelle operates four and half days per week: Monday, Tuesday,

Thursday, Friday and Saturday morning.• Out of hours program operates from the école on Wednesdays (it also has a role

during the other days of the week, supporting the teachers at lunch times and before/after school care).

• Morning program begins at 8.30am, lunch occurs at 11.30am.• Afternoon program begins at 1.30pm, day ends at 4.30pm.• Teaching staff are required to attend to some professional duties for some of their

lunch-time (11.30 am to 1.30pm) this does not include supervision of children.


43

• Director has a non-teaching role, professionally supporting teachers with program development, child pedagogy, liaison with families etc.

• Director provided with an apartment and utilities and has a rate of pay higher than that of her teaching colleagues.

• All staff provided with three weeks full-time professional development each year, full funded and planned.

• École terms operate in blocks of six weeks, with two weeks' holiday in-between except at the summer end-of-year break when the break is longer.

• Out of hours school care operate at the école maternelle during all term breaks.• There is no reliance for parents to pay fees, instead parents are asked to contribute

any amount they wish on a monthly basis. These monies are not necessary for the financial viability of the école; they are used for extra learning resources for the children.

• The Mairie de Paris education department undertakes all administration and budg-etary requirements.

• The école maternelle is fully funded by the Mairie, including buildings, equipment, resources, excursions, cafeteria and all other requirements. (Parents pay nominal cost for use of cafeteria by their children, providing children and teachers with a three-course lunch each day!)

• Teachers salaries are fully-funded and paid by la Ministère d’Éducation Nationale. (federal government education department)

• The école maternelle system has its own curriculum, it is not prescriptive, and is extended over the three year period the children attend the école.

• The early childhood professionals, teachers and directors, are vigilant that they preserve the importance of play and its role in the children’s learning.

• Le Monde de l’Éducation, governed by Mairie de Paris has an extensive range of educational professional consultants able to support teachers in the task of educating young children.

• Children start l’élémentaire (primary school) at the age of six.• The école maternelle and l’élémentaire are located physically side-by-side, with

many exchanges between the two.• All within the French education field hold the view that young children are able

to learn and learn well and that every opportunity should be afforded to engage children in this learning.

• The école maternelle system is viewed as the first and most important educational step children take in their life long learning journey.

sCoPE oF ProFEssional dEVEloPmEnt undErtakEn• Initial planning, paperwork and preparation with education authorities to be

allowed access to the école maternelle (undertaken from Australia).• Meeting with director of le Monde de l’Éducation of the Mairie de Paris for dis-

cussion surrounding education and the nature of the professional development teaching placement.

• Meeting with the pedagogy consultant to the école maternelle regarding philoso-

glEnys JaCksonfrom wangaratta to paris: early childhood education perspectives


phies of early childhood education.• Meeting with the director of the École Maternelle Glacière about the professional

development of the teaching placement.• Meeting with all staff for orientation and organisation of the teaching placement.

(Meetings were undertaken prior to placement within the école maternelle.)• Two-week full time placement within the school, spending days in each room of

each teaching section.• Teaching with my French colleagues, with hands on education of the children.• Implementing learning experiences about Australia with the children in each room,

appropriate to their developmental level. (A box of resources was sent to the école prior to my departure from Australia for use with the children when I arrived).

• Meeting with French families at the school discussing the benefits of the école maternelle system for their children.

• Lunch time meetings with teachers from each section discussing their teaching techniques, their educational beliefs and the field of early childhood education in France.

• A professional development presentation to French colleagues and directors about the preschool system in Victoria, our particular teaching techniques, educational beliefs, etc. at the Wangaratta West Kindergarten.

• Constant exchange of professional information and ideas with French colleagues at every opportunity!

• Meeting with the principal of a l'élémentaire (primary school) discussing the benefit of the école maternelle system and its support of children’s readiness for school and their future learning.

The links with école maternelle still continue between our children and now at an even greater level with our French teaching colleagues. Many emails and packages are being exchanged about teaching ideas, equipment, planning of programs, resources, and so forth.

45

Prior to thE 2004 Federal Election, the Liberal and National Party Coalition announced its policy regarding Australian Technical Colleges (ATC). The policy had the following features:

1. Establishment of 24 ATCs with six sites identified in Victoria: Eastern Melbourne, Sunshine, Geelong, Warrnambool, Bendigo, Bairnsdale/Sale. Funding of $289 million is to be provided, or approximately $12 million per location.

2. Each college will offer both academic and vocational education at the Year 11/12 level with a common curriculum of English, science, mathematics, information technology, employment-related and small business-related skills.

3. A specialist trade area will be offered at each site within the context of four trades: engineering, vehicle, construction, electrical.

4. ATCs will be run autonomously with a board chaired by industry and with staff from industry and the government and non-government school and training sectors.

5. An open tender process will be used and colleges will be established on both new and existing sites. Tenders will include partnerships of business, registered train-ing organisations including TAFE, government and non-government schools and universities.

6. Funding will be provided on a recurrent basis and for facilities in recognition of the

nEil hoolEy

aristotle,PhronEsis & technical

education


costs of establishment and maintenance.It is intended that the policy have two main directions. First to challenge the view that

apprenticeship and vocational education is second best to university. Second, to rectify a current skills shortage, to build a strong economic future and provide opportunities for all Australians. Programs will be open to ‘talented’ students in Years 11 and 12 who want to pursue a trade while undertaking their secondary education. The ATCs will be phased in over the period 2006-08.

baCkground to tEChniCal EduCationTechnical education in Australia has a significant, admirable and contested history.

It grew from the mechanics institutes and schools of arts first established in Scotland and England in the early part of the nineteenth century and spread rapidly throughout the English-speaking world. The first mechanics institute in Australia was founded in Hobart in 1827 and the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts in 1833. Newcastle, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane were quick to follow by 1840. The institutes offered public lec-tures, libraries and reading rooms, but were not exceptionally strong on the offering of trade training. The colonies relied on obtaining skill from overseas and given economic development and the gold rush, greater emphasis was soon placed on the schools of mines.

During this period, there was debate on the nature of education generally and techni-cal education in particular regarding whether its purpose was for the mutual benefit of citizens, or for the immediate use of industry, agriculture and mining. Technical education developed strongly during the 1840 to 1900 era and had a distinctive democratic intent around the liberal ideal. Following Federation and the pressure of war and economic depression, it took a more instrumental and narrow character as typified by the debate between the first director-general, Frank Tate and the chief inspector of technical schools, Donald Clark. The Education Act of 1910 set up post-primary schools of various types including ‘continuation’ schools and technical schools.

Establishment of technical institutions in Victoria which occurred before the turn of the century include the Schools of Mines at Ballarat (1870) and Bendigo (1873) and technical schools and colleges at Bairnsdale, Echuca and Warrnambool (1883); Sale and Stawell (1885); Castlemaine, Gordon Geelong and Working Men’s College Melbourne (1887); Maryborough (1888) and Daylesford (1890). After Federation, institutions were established at Collingwood (1912), Geelong (1913) and Brunswick and Footscray (1916).

Following World War II and the expansion of secondary education generally, techni-cal schools greatly swelled in number in Victoria, reflecting post-war reconstruction and the increasing manufacturing sector. Because of their close community connections, technical schools enjoyed a degree of autonomy not known by primary or high schools, a situation that was not rectified until changes to School Council regulation in 1975 and the Ministerial Papers of 1984. By this time, the secondary technical curriculum was intended to continue and extend the general programs provided by primary schools, to provide a broad experience across the social sciences, the natural sciences, the arts and practical and technical activities. In essence, this constitutes a direction trending towards


47

a comprehensive curriculum, although technical schools were perceived as being domi-nated by their trade components.

The election of the Whitlam government in 1972 saw the establishment of com-missions on pre-schooling and primary and secondary education. Technical educators realised that there was a gap in educational provision and following vigorous represen-tations to Canberra, the Australian Committee on Technical and Further Education was announced in April 1973. The report of the Kangan Committee was released in April 1974, effectively establishing TAFE institutions around Australia. The report saw technical and further education as concerning vocational education and the development of skills and understanding; the definition did not include other financially supported programs. The identification of TAFE as a discrete sector of education was also significant in that it recognised secondary education as being a discrete sector as well. In other words, schools are schools and TAFE is TAFE. As community expectations and retention rates to Year 12 increased over succeeding years, this distinction between the two systems became increasingly important.

By the early 1980s in Victoria, there were 110 secondary technical schools with 72,000 students and 7,500 staff, comprising a significant section of public secondary educational provision. Views regarding education were however changing and the newly elected Cain Labor Government established a ministerial review of post-compulsory schooling to investigate educational and training arrangements for 15 to 19 year olds. The esteemed South Australian educator, Jean Blackburn was appointed to chair the review. A discussion paper was released in April 1984 and the final report was issued in March 1985. Some of the major recommendations of the Blackburn Review involved the amalgamation of high and technical schools to achieve a comprehensive curriculum, the creation of a new, single Year 12 certificate and the formation of separate, senior secondary colleges. As was to be expected, the Blackburn recommendations were both supported and opposed. The Victorian Secondary Teachers Association for example welcomed the stance taken on curriculum and credentialing, but rejected the forma-tion of separate senior colleges. The amalgamation of high and technical schools was proceeded with, meaning that secondary technical education has not been available in Victoria for 20 years.

PhilosoPhy oF ‘tEChniCalnEss’Aristotle made a distinction between poiesis/techne, an activity of making and the

art of doing and phronesis/praxis, a knowledge that is personal and experiential where knowing and doing come together often for purposes that are not predetermined. These days, we tend to associate techne with the notion of a restricted technical rationality, a limitation that Aristotle recognised. In contrast, phronesis or praxis has a more open-ended nature, where participants interact with each other bringing to bear the emotional, intellectual and human interest to the problem at hand. The idea of the skilled worker that arose during the industrial revolution tended to break away from a rigid poiesis, but a full consummation of phronesis in terms of a moral basis to productive work remains to be achieved.

In considering the philosophical views of Aristotle and others on how we might

nEil hoolEyaristotle, phronesis and technical education


distinguish between various forms of theoretical and practical activity, knowledge and reasoning, we need to envision how these might inform our views of democratic school-ing for all children. This is particularly so in a country like Australia, where our economy is now expected to support a mass primary and secondary system that most young people will complete. The tension however of whether schooling encourages a perspec-tive of knowledge that is either poiesis or phronesis has not been resolved, certainly not at the secondary level. It is this tension that is at the heart of the debate that surrounds academic and vocational education.

Regardless of what might have been the actual condition of secondary technical education in the past, we are now in the position of considering this anew in light of the Prime Minister’s policy of establishing a series of technical colleges across Australia. Must we assume that this intervention will enforce a narrow relationship between skill training and education, or can we adopt a more contemporary notion of secondary education that builds on the idea of phronesis/praxis and involves all students in an integrated approach to learning? What would a curriculum of this type look like?

In the first place, we would not divide knowledge into academic and practical compartments, but would arrange a small number of broadly integrated studies so that practice and theory can feature across all. We could imagine five such areas for example, the humanities, arts, sciences, technologies and philosophy. Each would be structured around negotiated projects that focus on serious questions involving both student and community knowledge. Learning would support practical reasoning rather than an imposed academic truth. Advanced workshops, laboratories and studies would be avail-able to ensure that integrated experimental work would underpin all investigations.

These conditions are not based on assumptions about a secondary technical edu-cation dedicated to trade and apprenticeship training. Australian society has moved on from this position, to one where most young people are expected to complete secondary schooling as a distinctive sector in its own right and where a comprehensive curriculum is required to meet the learning needs of all children, male and female, city and country, privileged and disadvantaged. If a phronesis/praxis curriculum is too much at this time, then at the very least, all families should expect that their children will have the oppor-tunity at school to reflect on their experience and culture, to be able to draw upon their practical and theoretical knowledge and to engage the great ideas that have emerged from and have challenged previous generations.

Aristotle may have been wrong on a range of issues. Blackburn may not have been completely correct. But we can learn much from the efforts of others and as such, the his-tory of technical education in this country. We now understand that just as the physical universe expands, so too does the universe of knowledge demanding new approaches to learning and schooling. Students of today have a democratic right to experience a framework of respectful practical wisdom that infuses their classrooms and which brings practice and theory together in all phenomena. A curriculum that pretends to be either practical or theoretical alone is inherently inferior and must, finally, be discarded.


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rEFErEnCEs

Bainbridge, W. (Chair) (1983) Report of the Ministerial Working Party into Secondary Technical Education, Melbourne: The Working Party.

Baragwanath, P. (2000) If the walls could speak: A social history of the Mechanics Institutes of Victoria, Mechanics Institutes of Victoria Inc.

Bassett, J. (1995) Matters of Conscience: A history of the VSTA, VSTA.

Blackburn, J. (Chair) (1985) Ministerial Review of Postcompulsory Schooling, Report Volume 1, Melbourne: The Ministerial Review.

Blake, L. J. (Ed) (1973) Vision and Realisation: A centenary history of state education in Victoria, Melbourne: Education Department of Victoria.

Dunne, J. (1993) Back to the rough ground: ‘phronesis’ and ‘techne’ in modern philosophy and in Aristotle, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

Goozee, G. (2001) The Development of TAFE in Australia, NCVER.

Hooley, N., Moran, R., Hackett, M., and Burgess, P. (1983) The General Polytechnic School, The Victorian Teacher, December.

Kirby, P. (Chair) (2000) Ministerial Review of Postcompulsory Education and Training Pathways in Victoria: Final Report, DEET.

Kirby, P. (Chair) (1985) Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Labour Market Programs, AGPS.

Liberal Party. (2004) A Stronger Economy, A Stronger Australia. The Howard Government Election 2004 Policy: Australian Technical Colleges.

Moran, R. (1984) Putting a future tense to education: Problems and prospects for technical education, dis-cussion paper, TTUV.

Murray-Smith, S. (1988) Behind the mask: Technical education yesterday and today, Publications Unit, Footscray Institute of Technology.

Murray-Smith, S. (1987) The Tech: A centenary history of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, South Yarra: Hyland House.

Murray-Smith, S. (1966) A History of Technical Education in Australia, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne.

Rasmussen, C. (1989) Poor Man’s University: 75 years of Technical Education in Footscray, The Press of the Footscray Institute of Technology.

Victoria. (2004) VCAL: Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning, VQA.

Victoria. (2003) A Guide To School-Based New Apprenticeships for Victorian Secondary Students, VCAA.

Victoria. (1982) Technical Education Victoria 1982, Technical Schools Publication Unit.

Wigley, B. and Rechter, H. (1983) Girls Participation in Practical Subjects in Victorian Technical Schools, discussion paper, Transition Education Advisory Committee.

nEil hoolEyaristotle, phronesis and technical education

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ConsidEring PubliC EduCation as ‘a class act’ can lead in many directions. Firstly there are the many meanings of class. There is ‘class’ as social ranking. There is ‘class’ in its sense of collective action by a group as in a ‘class action’. There is ‘class’ in its meaning of quality, as in a ‘classy’ act. Then there is the meaning of ‘class’ as in ‘classroom’, a place where a group of students is taught. These four definitions of class will inform the exploration of public education as a class act in this paper.

Connotations oF ClassPavla Miller’s book, Long Division, traces the struggle for a public school system in South Australia that expressed the egalitarian ideal of quality education for all children and young people, irrespective of social rank. Miller points out, this idea always con-tained ‘the possibility that the gradual expansion of state schooling might undermine the exclusiveness of educational provisions for the rich’.

One South Australian lawyer and landowner, a Mr Downer, was clearly threatened and gave the whole notion of free state high schools short shrift in Parliament in 1879:

To provide that the inmates of the Destitute Asylum should have supplied to them raspberry jam tarts after every meal would be no more a luxury than to provide this higher education for people who had no business with it. It was interfering with the very laws of nature. Some must be higher and some lower,

lyndsay Connors

PubliC EduCation: a class act


but this was trying to make an average of the whole lot and to turn a great number of first-rate labourers into indifferent scholars. (p132)

No doubt my own state of NSW had its Downers too. But it also had strong egalitarian roots. Public schools were never seen as some kind of necessary but utilitarian adjunct to the private school system in NSW. Even our academically selective high schools owe their existence to a political commitment to giving outstanding students the chance to complete a full secondary schooling and to proceed to higher studies, irrespective of their family background. We might want to argue that changing circumstances have eroded the egalitarian significance of such schools. But as a personal beneficiary of this provision in my youth, I feel bound to point out that they were egalitarian in their origins.

Equality of opportunity would be simple if all children and young people were the same. But divergent patterns of educational access, participation, achievement and outcomes across different groups of students forced us to think about the issue of equity and justice: about when it is appropriate to treat students as if they were all the same and when it is appropriate to have regard to their differences.

South Australians took a leading role in helping us understand what it would mean to have a truly ‘classy’ education system, with quality resources and high achievement pos-sible for the many and not just the privileged few. I think of the contributions to policy and to pedagogy of Peter Karmel, Jean Blackburn and Garth Boomer—and many others.

It is in our classroom, as the great American educator Jerome Bruner reminds us, it is inside the hearts and minds of teachers and pupils as they work in classrooms that ‘the subtle process of education’ happens—the process of empowering of human intelligence and human sensibility for life in an open society. Research shows that what happens in classrooms within schools makes more difference to learning than what happens between schools.

A large, socially representative system of public schools creates a capacity for ‘class action’ to be brought to bear on many classrooms. It means a critical mass of practition-ers, working away in schools across South Australia that serve vastly differing communi-ties and that are connected in one system. Out of their shared experience comes shared wisdom—from the myriad of professional disputes, the shared analysis of accumulated and broad evidence and data, the breakthroughs of those teaching the students for whom learning is the hardest struggle, the insights of those working in culturally diverse com-munities, the brilliance of the most accomplished and the dedication of those who keep professional networks of all kinds alive.

My mother used to say, many years ago, ‘always go to a public hospital, Lyndsay, because they have the supply of blood’. I always felt when I sent my children to public schools that they had the ‘blood’ and that it consisted in the quality of that large body of teachers who, collectively, could teach any child, anywhere.

Where there are competing approaches to, say, the teaching of literacy, professional tensions will almost certainly surface within large state systems and the resulting profes-sional friction will lead to advancements in teaching across the nation’s classrooms. That is not to say the odd nest of Rip Van Winkles outside this class action won’t be aware of what has been happening and won’t take to the airwaves raising out of date concerns!

Some might argue that all of these connotations of ‘class’ apply to schooling generally.


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PubliC EduCation as a Class aCt

But what makes public education, in particular, a ‘class act’? Many of us are now bending our minds to this question, having realised that for too long we took for granted that a sys-tem of socially representative public schooling was universally recognised as a keystone of our democracy.

According to Christopher Pearson in the Weekend Australian newspaper, the end is nigh (Inquirer, January 15-16, p16). He stated: “In secondary education, the steady drift of stu-dents away from the public sector will inevitably provoke discussion about the critical point beyond which the sector verges on unsustainability”.

While it is always wise to hope for the best, it is necessary also to fear the worst. Since 1970, there has been a shift nationally of around 10 percentage points of the school popula-tion from public to non-government schools, more marked in secondary than primary. I know that for NSW the rate of that shift has been on average 60 per cent higher in the eight years since 1996 than over the whole prior 21 years.

What would it matter if that trend were simply to continue apace? What lies at the heart of public schooling that would be lost?

At the heart of public schooling lies the notion of universal entitlement to learning, pro-tected in this and every other Australian state and territory by legislation, Acts of Parliaments. Public education is a class act, with a capital ‘A’ for Act. My personal circumstances when I was young may have served to bring this home to me. In my last year of high school, my mother died after a long and terrible illness. One of the reasons my world did not fall com-pletely apart was because of the legacy of my mother and all those like her—who gladly paid their tax to support a good public education system.

I stayed on at my school to sit the Leaving Certificate as my mother had wanted. I stayed on in a place that was provided for me in my own right by the State Government of NSW. It was not a place in a public institution for those without their natural parents, it was not a place provided as an act of private charity or philanthropy. It was not paid for by a personal cheque left by my mother, or by the grace and favour of a fee waiver. The school was not a club for social networking. That school and its teachers had one primary mission—to assist us all to be able to think for ourselves in and about this world—to make sense of it, to live rewarding private and shared lives, notwithstanding and leaving open the right to beliefs in things beyond this world. It was in that sense a secular mission.

There will always be communities of shared values, religious and other, with an interest in sponsoring schools to reinforce the values of member families. There will always be those with a vested interest in schools that reinforce their privilege and status. There will always be markets for trading in profitable skills. But it took Acts of collective public purpose and com-mitment to bring into being our large and socially representative systems of public schools that are open to all without exception. And it will take ongoing acts of collective purpose and commitment to maintain and advance their purposes and to realise their full potential. For public schooling is a historically recent development, a work in progress. It is far from perfect. I understand very well that had I been part of the Aboriginal community where I grew up, I my experience of public schooling would have been vastly different.

lyndsay Connorspublic education: a class act


a ColdEr ClimatE For PubliC EduCationSchools are working in the context of a growing spatial divide. Despite overall economic growth during the late 1990s, and a general increase in skills among the adult population, the educational divide between the most affluent and the poorest 10 per cent of postal areas in Australia increased over these years. (NATSEM, 2004).

The leaders in public schools that I meet in my work are keenly aware that such a divide creates a harsh climate for public schooling to flourish.

In the context of theories of small government there is a growing gap between what we are prepared to invest publicly in each others’ children in public schools and what some well educated and well off parents are able to pay privately for the education of their own. And when resources in public schools are limited, parents are anxious about putting their children into a competition with students who, whether for reasons of behaviour problems or educational needs, take up more of the teachers’ time than their own children do.

Parents who see themselves as being a vulnerable minority in our culturally and ethni-cally diverse society may also seek to withdraw into their own schools outside the public sector. Some may even be willing, at least initially, to forego a decent level of resources, to gain what they see as the advantage of educating their children within the confines of their own community and its distinctive beliefs and values. As confirmed by Louise Watson’s work, however, the group of students moving from public to non-government schools comes disproportionately from a higher SES group than those remaining.

There is a world of difference between a school place to which a student has an entitle-ment in her or his own right and a school place that is open only to a student whose parent or parents can meet the financial, religious or other criteria set privately by the owners of non-government schools.

Australia, as a matter of deliberate policy, is converting the former into the latter, and is already well advanced towards the ‘market’ scenario described by the OECD as appropriate for countries willing to tolerate inequality.

Around 95 per cent of all the teachers in Australian schools, public and non-govern-ment, have their salaries paid from the public purse, Commonwealth plus state. And those salaries are roughly similar across the sectors. But some of those teachers within and between the sectors face vastly differing degrees of difficulty if we are expecting them to achieve comparable outcomes for their students.

What all this means, in practice, is that the total workload of schools is being shared among schools and teachers in an increasingly unfair way. Some schools are being left to do the really heavy lifting with an inadequate share of the public resources available. Those schools are almost exclusively in the public system.

This raises the question of what schools leaders can do in the current context?

CurrEnt ContExtThere is no shortage of policy prescriptions. The work the Public Education Council has been doing in NSW is identifying more evidence for the view that, far from fragmenting and fractur-ing our public systems along the lines suggested by many prophets of the doom, we should be exploring more actively their potential for collaboration and systemic action to broaden learning opportunities for the students they serve. How perverse would it be for governments


55

to reduce their commitment to public schools right at the time when they are better placed then ever in their history to harness new technologies and to bring new opportunities to every school site—a capability for the comprehensiveness we could only dream of in times past.

Some of the prescriptions for re-positioning public education need a good reality check.The Christopher Pearson article bagged the very concept of centralised decision-making

and bureaucracies to deliver effective schooling. But a conservative UK columnist observed in a recent article that there was no evidence that the super-centralised French school sys-tem was less successful than the fragmented British system. He went on to point out that many tremendous human achievements relied on intelligent centralisation of command, and that leaving public services to competition was a way to introduce wasteful duplication of resources and to blind providers to the public interest.

Others suggest that less reliance on public funding would be a shot in the arm for public schooling and that the best way of adding value to public schools is through public-private partnerships. An example was a recent discussion paper, Adding Value to Public Education: An Examination of the Possibilities for Public Private Partnerships by Brian Caldwell and Jack Keating, 2004, sponsored by the Australian Council of Deans.

Advantages can be gained from strengthening the links between communities and their schools and some educationally important connections could flow from genuine philanthropy as well as from responsible and appropriate forms of sponsorship and partnership where the benefits to all partners are transparent.

The key is adding value—not substituting for the value of adequate and planned resourcing of public schools by governments. Where school leaders have been encouraged to engage in time-consuming, financial side ventures, my experience has been that this can lead to neglect of their main game—effecting teaching and learning.

How curious that no one suggests that private schools should put their faith in private partnerships, or sponsorships or donations as a substitute for their increasing reliance on government funding. Who could fail to be impressed with the political and financial acumen of those responsible for Catholic systemic schools in Australia? Faced by the 1970s with the loss of the contributed services of religious teachers, they required a new source of funding for lay teachers. Had they thought for one moment that sponsorship from a soft drink or fast food manufacturer or a philanthropic donation would prove a better source of the funds to pay their teachers than governments I am sure they would have gone for that solution. Or would go for it now. The reality is that only governments can mobilise the resources needed to provide the continuity of provision of universal schooling.

Others have argued to delete the issue of ‘social class’ from schooling and to revert to policies that use schools to reinforce and entrench social and economic inequalities, rather than to progress towards a more informed and just society. In his 2004 Radford Lecture, sponsored by the Australian Association for Research in Education, Class war and the war on class: the two faces of neo-conservative research in the Australian media, Professor Richard Teese unpicks the flawed research that has assisted certain journalists and editorialists to justify the curtailment of public spending on public schools and to spare public subsidies to high fee, high resource schools from the ‘egalitarian axe’.

According to some, resources do not matter, but they do matter to those teaching and learning in the schools that do not have adequate or appropriate resources.

lyndsay Connorspublic education: a class act


EduCational EntitlEmEntI have left until the end one of the great central challenges of public schooling. And it takes us back to the central notion of educational entitlement. For that entitlement to be in a public school and to learn is an entitlement that is equally shared among all children and young people. Achieving that is a very tall order, indeed.

The problem is well described by eminent practitioner and theorist, Pat Thomson. In her remarkable book, Schooling the Rustbelt Kids: Making the Difference in Changing Times, 2002, Thomson says:

Recognising the difficulties in achieving more equitable changes can be depressing. When teachers have ‘realistic’ expectations of what they can achieve it can sometimes mean lowered expectations, which translate into low achievement for students. On the other hand, teachers’ utopian, emanci-patory ideas can become heartbreaking self-realisations of futility, or alterna-tive forms of domination and authoritarianism.

It is important for school leaders and teachers to understand that much of what equity means can be understood in terms of ‘the golden rule’ that lies at the heart of many religions and ethical systems—treat your students as you would wish to be treated if you were in their shoes. To do that, principals and teachers have to know their students and families well.

This would lead to a set of practical conditions that need to be met. The first is to ensure that, at the very least, our schools do no damage to their students. Then we would need to set as a condition the achievement of the minimum of learning that would justify having compelled a child to attend school in the first place. Having ensured that such basic conditions are being met, the next obligation would be to dream about the wonder-ful difference that our schools can make to all our children’s lives.

Thomson states in her book that: “The paradoxes and ambiguities around equity and jus-tice in education are unpalatable to policy makers, who more than ever want simple and tech-nical ‘solutions’ rather than slow movement against a murky tide and tugging backwash.”

I want to end by celebrating the principals and teachers in our quality public schools for the wonderful contribution they make, in schools across the country, for their efforts to resist that murky tide—the tide of ignorance—and that tugging backwash to inequality. And that is, in itself, the most worthwhile kind of work that most of us can think of if we value our children and their shared futures. That is the class act that is public education.This paper is an abridged version of a keynote address to the South Australian State Education leaders Convention of January 2005.

rEFErEnCEs

Bruner, J. (1994). Four Ways to Make a Meaning, AERA 1994 Annual Meeting, New Orleans.

Doherty, P, McGaw, B, & O’Loghlin B (2004). ‘Level the learning field’, The Australian, 30 April 2004.

Lloyd, R, Yap, M & Harding, A. 2004. A spatial divide? Trends in the incomes and socioeconomic characteristics of regions between 1996 and 2001. Paper presented to the 298th Australian and New Zealand Regional Science Association International Annual Conference, Wollongong.

Ryan, C & Watson, L. (2004). ‘The Drift to Private Schools in Australia: Understanding its Features’. Discussion Paper No. 479, ANU Cenre for Economic Policy Research.

Thomson, P. (2002). Schooling the Rustbelt Kids: Making the difference in changing times. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

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Who is thE most satisfied with their pro-fession—doctors, lawyers, engineers or teach-ers? A longitudinal study by Don Anderson, titled The Profession of Teaching, sheds light on this question as part of a broader analysis of teach-ing as a profession.

Anderson’s study began in 1967 when he surveyed 1,275 students as they enrolled for their secondary teacher education courses in six chosen universities and finished 37 years later in 2004 when some of these same teachers had retired. The value and interest of the study lies not only in its duration, but also in the contrasts and comparisons Anderson is able to draw using parallel studies of lawyers, engineers and doctors who he surveyed about the same issues between 1965 and 1998.

One of the striking differences between this

thinkingabout tEaChing as a

profession

rEViEWThe Profession of Teaching By Don Anderson

Published by the Australian College of Educators, March 2005.

John graham


cohort of teachers and those entering teacher education courses today was the financial support they received to complete their university education. 90 per cent were recipients of secondary scholarships which covered their tuition fees, provided them with a living allowance and assisted them with accommodation. The scholarship scheme is described by Anderson as one of the two ‘most effective interventions ever made by governments towards greater social equality in university admissions’. (p12)

Many of the teachers were from families without any background in higher education or the professions, many were from the country and over half were women. The contrast to the other professions is instructive. 39 per cent of teachers came from the country as compared to 20 per cent of the doctors, 19 per cent of the engineers and 17 per cent of the lawyers. 64 per cent of teachers had been to a public secondary school as compared to 57 per cent of engineers, 34 per cent of doctors and 32 per cent of the lawyers.

The gender differences between the professions were stark. While 57 per cent of the teacher cohort was female, women made up only 20 per cent of the doctors, 11 per cent of the lawyers and just 1 per cent of the engineers. The parents of the doctors and lawyers are described as being ‘wealthier and from professional and managerial backgrounds’ as compared to those of the teachers and engineers.

The survey respondents were asked a series of questions about their motivation, their career development, changes in their role over time and whether they would recommend their profession to a young person. The results showed teachers as being more ambiva-lent about the satisfactions of their profession than the other groups.

When the four groups were asked to rank the social prestige of nine different profes-sions—the four in the survey plus diplomats, scientists, university teachers, architects and dentists—school teachers were ranked the lowest by all groups, including the teach-ers themselves. While it might be said that teachers were just reflecting a social reality in their view of the social status of their profession, their responses to two other questions seem to indicate a level of discontent, and even regret, about their chosen career.

When they were asked: if it was financially possible for you to retire, or semi-retire now, would you do so, 61 per cent of teachers said ‘yes’; a significantly higher figure than the other professions. Additionally, only 36 per cent of the teachers at the end of their long teaching careers agreed that: “If I had to do it over again, I would definitely become a teacher”. This contrasts with the more positive view of doctors (66 per cent), engineers (56 per cent) and lawyers (46 per cent) when asked the same question about their own professions.

Anderson identifies income levels as one of the key sources of teacher dissatisfac-tion, and something which sets them apart from the other professions. While two-thirds of teachers felt they were under-rewarded for the work that they do, only 41 per cent of engineers, 46 per cent of lawyers and 54 per cent of doctors felt the same way. Other causes of teacher discontent reflected what they saw as negative developments over the course of their careers—students becoming less motivated and harder to teach, parents being less supportive and more demanding, a lessening of professional autonomy and an accumulating morass of administrivia and meaningless accountability demands.

Balancing out this negative view of their profession, was what Anderson calls ‘the intrinsic satisfactions of their work’, where teachers ranked above the other professions.


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89 per cent of teachers saw their work as being important to the community and 84 per cent agreed that their daily work was ‘always varied and interesting’. The contrasting figures for lawyers, for example, were respectively 61 per cent and 63 per cent. Even more positively, 80 per cent of teachers were able to make the big statement (that we would all like to make) about their working life: “My work has been a major source of satisfaction in my life”.

ProFEssional CohEsionIn the final part of the study Anderson contrasts the professional environment for teachers with that for doctors. He argues that doctors would regard as ‘outrageous’ any attempt by governments to intervene in their professional work in the way that they do in the work of teachers. He sees the intensification of accountability measures (implying a lack of trust in the quality of their work) as undermining the professionalism of teachers. His conten-tion is that doctors are able to more successfully resist similar attacks on their profession because of their greater professional cohesion.

Anderson believes that teachers need a single organisation to represent the whole profession in the same way that the AMA represents (almost) all doctors. He sees the teacher unions as potentially the only organisations capable of fulfilling this role

“Advocates for teacher professionalism should understand that there is no inherent incompatibility between industrial advocacy and scholarly and development functions. In fact the two go together, as may be seen in medicine, law, engineering etc.” (p36)

The problem for teachers is that their profession, and therefore their professional and industrial muscle, is split between two unions, one representing the public sector (the AEU) and the other representing the private sector (the IEU). The AMA on the other hand, represents all doctors regardless of whether they practise in the public or private systems of medicine. What Anderson doesn’t discuss is the corollary of this, the AMA’s inability or unwillingness to uphold the integrity of the public sector and oppose moves to further privatisation.

The Profession of Teaching is a brief but thought-provoking paper, which broadens the parameters within which discussion of teacher professionalism has usually been held. Its recognition that teacher unionism is the only effective means for teachers to have a coherent professional voice, is timely. Statutory authorities, government-endorsed organisations and non-industrial professional associations have all made claims in recent times to be the over-arching professional body for teachers. The reality is that none of these organisations have the membership, the independence or the breadth of purpose of the teacher unions. As for the odds on a single big teacher union covering the whole profession emerging some time in the foreseeable future, this requires a calculation way beyond the scope of this small review.

John grahamreview: the profession of teaching

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authortitle

contributorsonnotEs

andy hargrEaVEs is the Thomas More Brennan Chair of Education in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Before this he was the founder and co-director of the International Centre for Educational Change at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto). Andy has held visiting professorships and fellowships in England, Australia, Sweden, Spain, the United States, Hong Kong and Japan. He is holder of the Canadian Education Association/Whitworth 2000 Award for outstanding contributions to educational research in Canada. His book, Changing Teachers, Changing Times received the 1995 Outstanding Writing Award from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. Among his other recent books are Teaching In The Knowledge Society: Education In The Age Of Insecurity, and Learning to Change: Teaching Beyond Subjects and Standards, Jossey-Bass, 2001 (with Lorna Earl, Shawn Moore and Susan Manning). Andy Hargreaves’ work has been translated extensively into more than a dozen languages. Professor Hargreaves’ current research interests include the emotions of teaching and leading and the sustainability of educa-tional change and leadership. Chris bigum is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Deakin University. His research and teaching interests are in the implications of computing and communications technologies for educational practice and policy. Specifically, these interests include: new literacy studies, actor-network approaches to the study of educational innovation, digital epistemologies, schools as knowledge producers, and scenario planning in education.

lEoniE roWE is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Deakin University where she is Co-ordinator of the Quality learning Research Priority. Her research interests


relate to the broad fields of equity and social justice and she is particularly interested in the use of transformative pedagogy for disrupting traditional patterns of exclusion in diverse educational and cultural sites. Within this framework she has focused on areas such as boys in schools, new literacies and ICT, critical literacy and, most recently, the benefits of reading aloud in developing literacy in early years.

Pat byrnE is Australian Education Union Federal president, a position she has held since May, 2003. Prior to that, in 1999, Pat was the first woman elected as President of the State School Teachers’ Union of Western Australia; she retained that position until moving to Melbourne at the beginning of 2004 to take up her present role. Pat’s background is in primary education. Much of her classroom experience has been as an English as a Second Language teacher in both metropolitan and country locations. It was this experience, especially working with the first “wave” of Vietnamese refugee children to arrive in WA— in the late 1970s—which led to her commitment towards social justice in education and to her election to the SSTUWA executive.

darCEl moylE Darcel Moyle is the Australian Education Union (AEU) Federal Aboriginal Education Officer. Darcel is a Goori woman from Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island), which is located off the South East coast of Queensland. Prior to commencing work with the AEU, Darcel was the manager of the Indigenous Studies Product Development Unit, TAFE Queensland. Before working with TAFE, Darcel was employed by Education Queensland, where she worked as a Remote Area Teacher Education Program (RATEP) teacher-coordinator, a classroom teacher, and as a curriculum and instructional designer. Darcel is the current chair of the ACTU Indigenous committee and the Indigenous repre-sentative on the ACTU executive. She is passionate about the power of education as a tool for increasing social opportunity and promoting change.

glEnys JaCkson is Co-Educator & Co-Director, Wangaratta West Kindergarten, Victoria. She has been a NEiTA awards and Australian Teachers Prizes for Excellence recipient (2001, 2002) and ASG Grant for Professional Development recipient (2002).She holds Diploma of Teaching (Primary); Post-Graduate Certificate, Early Childhood Teaching; Post-Graduate Diploma, Early Childhood Teaching and Bachelor of Education qualifications.

lyndsay Connors is one of the many Australians who owe their education to the public education system. She has held many appointments, including being a parent representative to the National Committee on English Teaching, a full-time mem-ber of the Commonwealth Schools Commission, in which capacity she also chaired the Curriculum Development Council, a Schools Commissioner, chair of the Schools Council of the National Board of Employment, Education and Training (NBEET) and, as an NBEET member, was Deputy Convenor of the Women’s Employment, Education and Training Advisory Group, deputy chair of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, deputy chair of the Board of the Open Learning Technology Corporation and a member


63

of the Australian Children’s Television Foundation. Lyndsay received Honorary Doctorates from the University of Canberra and the University of South Australia for her contribution to public education in the 1990s. More recent appointments have included director of Higher Education in the NSW Department of Education and Training (1996-2000) and chair of the Victorian Ministerial Working Party, Public Education: The Next Generation (2000). In 2002 she undertook an Inquiry into ACT Education Funding. In that year she was also appointed to chair the NSW Public Education Council. The Council produced a major report, NSW Public Schools: Building on Strong Foundations in March 2005, prior to its being disbanded.

nEil hoolEy is a former teacher of mathematics and science at the secondary level and is currently a lecturer in the School of Education, Victoria University, Melbourne. His interests include equity in education, the establishment of partnerships between universities and schools, a democratic and pragmatic approach to the teaching of mathematics and science and the investigation of teaching and learning through action research. Neil has worked with Indigenous communities in Victoria and is strongly com-mitted to the place of education in supporting Indigenous reconciliation in Australia.

John graham is a research officer at the Australian Education Union (Vic Branch) with the responsibility for researching curriculum and professional developments in edu-cation and training. He has written extensively about curriculum change, teachers and teaching as a profession, developments in education at an institutional, state and federal level and on a range of other matters from funding to organisational review. John has been a teacher in Victorian government secondary schools, a researcher and writer for a national equity program and a project manager and policy developer for the Department of Education and Training.

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notes on contributors


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ISSN Number: 1445-4165

Editorial: Teaching quality & quality teachingPat Byrne

Teaching in the konwledge societyAndy Hargreaves

Quality teaching for quality learning: CCTs and transformative classroomsLeonie Rowan & Chris Bigum

Quality educators produce quality outcomesDarcel Moyle

From Wangaratta to Paris: Early childhood education perspectivesGlenys Jackson

Aristotle, phronesis and technical educationNeil Hooley

Public education: A class actLyndsay Connors

As well as a review of The Profession of Teaching By Don Anderson.

Featuring essays by

professional voice volume 4 issue 1

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quality educators

educational quality

indigenous education

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aeu guidelines

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